Mixed up words

Scrambling words from a sentence in order to put them back together in the right order have always been a fun way to learn syntax.

I have recently discovered Wordle, a site that allows you to go further by creating a cloud of mixed up words not just from a sentence but from a whole text.

This offers the teacher the option of also working on vocabulary and deduction, especially when using long texts. So we mainly have two options:

• We can either enter just a sentence, like "The bus stops in front of my house", click on Go and get a scrambled sentence for the students to put the words back in order while working on syntax

• Or we can enter a whole text, click on Go and get a scrambled text for the students to select either the most meaningful words or the unknown words in order to work on vocabulary, while also working on meaning deduction. Here you can see an example I have just created from a chocolate covered strawberries recipe:

The students will have the chance of focusing on the most common words (highlighted by a bigger size) to deduce the overall meaning of the original text.

Of course, we can also encourage our older students (and even our younger ones, as the site is really easy to use) to create their own word clouds from topics they are interested in, like friendship, music, a movie they like, etc.