Grade Six Word Cloud Book Reports

Sixth graders have been using our school's brand new Chrome books in many ways: answering an extended response question using Padlet, taking the STARS assessment tests, and making word clouds.

What's a word cloud? It is a visual representation of multiple verbal ideas to create a theme. Word clouds have been around a long time as far as computer technology goes. Some popular websites that help users create clouds are Wordle, ABCya, Tagxedo, and Tagul.

I introduced our sixth graders to Tagul on Sept. 19th after I showed them a video of word cloud book reports created by our current eighth graders. They were hooked! Word clouds look FUN! What they didn't realize is that there is MUCH thinking involved in creating a cloud, especially for a book report. No sentences can be written; thoughts are expressed in words, actually the size of words and the number of times a word appears. Imagine trying to develop a book report using only single words!

Here is what our students created...


Now that our sixth graders are familiar with word clouds, they can use them to do projects in other classes or make gifts/cards for family and friends. Words clouds created on Tagul are able to be printed and downloaded. When you download a word cloud file from Tagul, you can use it as a computer desktop background or as part of a screen saver. It is a typical image file just as a photo is. Students are welcome to use the class account that I opened for this project or they may create their own free account at Tagul with your permission.