Word Cloud Cloze Sentence Activity

This is an activity which I learned from Cindy Hitz, and it is a great higher-order thinking, post-reading activity involving word clouds. In the past, I have normally used word clouds as a vocabulary highlighter game or have students predict what they think is going to happen in the story. Cindy takes it to the next level and uses the word clouds as part of a cloze sentence activity. So instead of calling out individual vocabulary words where students race to highlight words, now you read out cloze sentences from a reading, and students race to highlight the missing word in the word cloud.

You can find directions for this activity here on Cindy's blog at the bottom under the heading "Game Smashing with Word Clouds." 

Here are my directions on how to create word clouds using MS Word 

Example - this is based on the Monster and Dumpling Movie Talk:

Word Cloud

Slide presentation with cloze sentences



Observations

1. This is a great post-reading activity, but students need to be very familiar with the reading before they do this since they are doing cloze sentences without a word bank per se.
2. I loved the double input which students received in this activity - visually seeing the sentences and me reading them aloud.
3. Keep the sentences somewhat short, because the activity involves a lot of processing, so to give students a long sentence for they which they have to understand the meaning, to realize what the missing word is, and then to find it in a scrambled word cloud is a lot. 
4. I thought that students would struggle with knowing what the missing word was, when in actuality, students told me that was the easy part (again, because we had gone over the story so many times in different ways). The difficult part for them was finding the word in the word cloud before their opponents!
5. I love the higher-order thinking going on in this activity. It goes way beyond the basics of the regular vocabulary highlighter game. 
6. To keep the faster processors from always finding the word first, sometimes I would tell students that they had to wait until I said, "Go!" This allowed the slower processors a chance. 
7. Although I only focused on one reading, I threw in distractor words from other passages to fill out the word cloud.