Need a primary level Wordle-type site?? Here it is...

I was jumping for joy when I found this site earlier this year. I've used Wordle in the past with 2nd graders and although they did a great job there were a lot of choices for them in regards to color, style, etc that seemed to take some of them far too long to decide on their final product. There was also the possibility of coming across inappropriate Wordle's in the gallery which was something I was a bit uncomfortable with. Well... fear not- there is a solution and it's ABCya! Word Clouds.

Just to give you an example of what an ABCya! word cloud looks like, I pasted the paragraph above into the word cloud generator and here's what my creation ended up looking like. It doesn't take out as many of the insignificant words as Wordle does, but to me, that far outweighs the other issues.

Once students have typed or cut and pasted their text into the generator they are able to change the font, the color scheme (only 8 to choose from), and change the format (only 3 layouts available). ABCya's Word Clouds also give you the option to print your creation or save it, something that Wordle made difficult for 1st/2nd graders to do.

This would be great for students to use with a short story or a poem. I personally have used it for students' poems for our May baskets as well as for cloze-sentence projects. It just gives it a little different flair and really appeals to our digital native learners.