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Vocabulary games with Wordles
Wordle, from www.wordle.net, is a generator of ‘word clouds’, or colourful displays of key words from texts. See the resource Genetic engineering Wordles for two examples. This kind of resource is extremely easy to produce, very versatile and very appealing. Wordles are a great way of making students learn new vocabulary without any effort and with a lot of fun. Idea 1 1. Before your lesson, create a word cloud with the vocabulary you want your students to learn, for example, words related to genetic engineering. You can do this either by typing in the words yourself or by copying in a text that contains suitable vocabulary. If you use a text, the most frequent words will be the biggest in the word cloud. 2. You could start your lesson by brainstorming words from the topic you have chosen. 3. Then organise a competition, which students always love. Tell them that to win the competition they will need three things: attention, memory and speed! Give them the following instructions: a) You are going to look at a slide with words on for about two minutes. b) Try to memorise as many words as you can (without writing anything down!) 4. Now hide the slide. Students have another two/three minutes to write down as many words as they can remember. 5. Students call out their words or write them up on the board to reconstruct the word cloud. The winner is the student with the longest list of words without any mistakes. Most students will have learned all the vocabulary by the time they leave the class! 6. The next lesson, show students another slide with another word cloud, including vocabulary and connectors they have learned before. In pairs/groups, students have to write sentences, using the words and all the connectors. Once again, organise this activity as a competition. Your students will love it! © www.teachitworld.com 2009
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Vocabulary games with Wordles
Idea 2 Another way of making use of this resource is to show students a slide with any vocabulary and ask them to write a story using all the words given. Idea 3 Before starting an extensive reading activity, show students a word cloud with some words related to the story as well as the names of some characters and ask students to imagine a story using all the words of the word cloud. It’s great fun to read the different stories created by the students and then to compare their versions with the original one. Although this is a quite common activity, the fact that students have to find the words in the ‘cloud’ gives them extra motivation. © www.teachitworld.com 2009
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