Incredible Imagery!

I know that my class are a creative bunch but this week they have once again amazed me! I have always been a little dubious about the quality of 'shape poems', but decided to give them another go. I am so glad I did! 

We began by developing a bank of powerful vocabulary. I am a bit tired of vocab. banks so we used Tagxedo. For those of you who haven't used this yet, it's a fantastic free online resource! It's a little like Wordle, but you can choose the shape. We imported images. Simple ones work best usually although some shadowy pics can be effective. Here are some of our weather ones (as you can see, spelling slips when typing! Something to work on there, I think)

sTagxedo is also a great resource for children new to speaking English. 

After that, the children worked with their writing buddies to put this vocabulary into fantastic sentences, using personification and other imagery. For the writing buddies, I have paired children with a 'complimentary' partner; one may be very creative, the other very accurate. It's working a treat! The children wrote their sentences on different lengths of paper to help them to create a tornado shape. You can see for yourself how beautiful the results were!