I've been teaching for 10 years now and every year, I always ask myself "what would be a good end of the year gift to give to my students?". Here are some things that I've done in the past: books, class t-shirts, class dvd with a slideshow of the year in pictures, and a journal. This year, I wanted to do something different that would be meaningful to my students and parents as well. And where do I go to find my ideas? Pinterest of course! I really love finding ideas on Pinterest for just about everything! So, this year I found this great Pinterest Student Gift Idea.
What do I love about it? I love that it's personal, memorable, and encouraging for each student. Did it take some time to think of words for each student? Why, definitely! But I also found a list of positive personality character traits that helped me find the right words for each student. This took me a good hour to type and print each one out for my 23 wonderful 1st graders.
So, how did I make these cute and awesome gift? Well, here's what I did:
1) Go to www.wordle.net (I have a MacBook Pro and I could only use this website using the Safari web browser)
2) Click on "Create" (if you don't have the latest Java update then you'll probably have to install that onto your computer).
3) In the box where it says "Paste a bunch of text:", I typed the student's name 3 times in a line so that their name would show up bigger than the rest of the words.
What do I love about it? I love that it's personal, memorable, and encouraging for each student. Did it take some time to think of words for each student? Why, definitely! But I also found a list of positive personality character traits that helped me find the right words for each student. This took me a good hour to type and print each one out for my 23 wonderful 1st graders.
So, how did I make these cute and awesome gift? Well, here's what I did:
1) Go to www.wordle.net (I have a MacBook Pro and I could only use this website using the Safari web browser)
2) Click on "Create" (if you don't have the latest Java update then you'll probably have to install that onto your computer).
3) In the box where it says "Paste a bunch of text:", I typed the student's name 3 times in a line so that their name would show up bigger than the rest of the words.
4) Then I just typed 8-9 words that described each student's personality (one word per line).
5) Finally, click the "go" button.
6) Wordle will automatically create a layout of your words with a font and color. I chose to have all my words be "mostly horizontal" and to make it easy, I went with the already prescribed color combinations. To adjust any of these, you can click on "Layout", "Color", "Font".
Here's the final product and what it looked in the end for me. I think it came out really cute and I hope my students will love them! I'm planning on spending the last 30 minutes on the last day of school presenting them to each student by reading each one out loud. Happy end of the school year!
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