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Because my students need to have a larger repertoire of "Character Traits" to choose from when describing characters in the books we read, we are creating a Visual Thesaurus of traits using Tagul. ...
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Scooped by Beth Dichter |
Scoop.it!
Beth Dichter's insight:
This lesson plan is a great way to incorporate a range of technology into a lesson. In this case Paul Solarz (the teacher) realized that students needed to learn to use a thesaurus, and chose to have them focus on traits, as they are a key component of literature. After providing lists of character traits to the students he taught them how to use Tagel (to create the word clouds) and thesaurus.com (free online). Click through to the website to read the full post. You will also find a link to the many word clouds that were created by his students) for some of the features included within it.
If you have students whom are ELL you may want to check out wordsift.com. It uses visual thesaurus (slightly different than thesaurus.com) and has other resources that help many learners, including images that are associated with specific words, the ability to create a workspace and pull in words and images, and lists of words (such as ELA, science, math, history) so students may learn which words are important in different subjects. WordSift does not allow you to make word clouds as do the many other word cloud tools but is a valuable tool to learn to use.
really takes the wind out of a Jane Austen novel.
This resource is a terrific educational and interactive website relevant to the English Syllabus for Stage 2 learners, and links to outcome;
WRITING AND REPRESENTING 2
OUTCOME
A student:
› identifies and uses language forms and features in their own writing appropriate to a range of purposes, audiences and contexts EN2-7B.
The site explain's a lesson idea that could be used to increase student's vocabulary on how to describe character traits/characteristics when composing a writing passage or story. It allows student's to broaden their vocabulary repertoire, and gain skills to be able to compose and present well-structured and coherent texts, that include descriptive and interesting character's.
This site can be used following a lesson that has just explained what traits/characteristics are (such as my IWB resource). The site encourages student's to choose a word from the 'characteristic list' (such as the one on my IWB resource). Then determine its common antonym with help from the thesaurus and create a word cloud for it using the synonyms that were listed on thesaurus.com. Additionally, the site displays a link ‘tagul.com’ which is an ICT resource which allows student’s to create ‘word clouds’. Another great tool to introduce to student’s to assist with expanding vocabulary.
Overall, this is a great resource that will provide an opportunity for students to learn about characteristics, and accumulate a diverse repertoire of new vocabulary and hopefully assist with writing well-structured and coherent texts.