Recently a mum in the playground mentioned a learning activity her school aged children had enjoyed using on the computer. I am always keen to try out new educational games on the internet if they are appropriate and fun. The site is Wordle.

My Kindy daughter has been going on it every day this week. She loves words and reading and this is just another way to encourage her eagerness to learn. She enjoys the physical aspect of typing on the keyboard as well as choosing her favourite words (and usually ones she can spell) to create word clouds.

My daughter's favourite choice of words

The more she types in a particular word, the bigger it will be in the word cloud. As you can see in the screen shot above, her name is of course one of the larger words as this is one of the first words she learnt to read and write. She also enjoyed pressing the ‘randomize’ button which would rearrange the words and change the font and colour, until she found her favourite combination. A great way to develop spelling, word recognitinon and fine motor skills through using the keyboard.

It even lets you type in your url for your blog/website to create a cloud, here’s mine:

I got  my son to try Wordle as a fresh way to practice spelling his words of the week, he did it but much more begrudgingly!