SWGfL Resources

There are some great resources available on the SWGfL Merlin site that can be used even if you are not a subscriber. Special mentions from me go to ‘Word Detective‘ and ‘Word Wizard‘

Abbreviations and Contractions

This site has many games that might be useful in a primary classroom or for children to use at home. Room 108.  Favourites at the moment for Nicola Stables are the word games to do with abbreviations and contractions.

Wordsift – ‘We would be happy if you think of it playfully’

Belatedly, working my way through the feeds that I challenge myself to read regularly I came across an application named in Tim Ryland’s Blog that reminded me that I had tucked a note about it away … and had then forgotten all about it … reading that Tim had used it caused me to go there and take the look I should have taken ages ago.

The application is Wordsift and I feel that it sits nicely alongside Wordle in the way that it allows lateral vocabulary thinking  to move a step forward … and it is just there to use – no log on, no password etc

In their own words this is what the developers say about Wordsift:

WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. We especially hope that this tool is helpful in supporting English Language Learners. We want WordSift to be a useful tool, but we also want it to be fun and visually pleasing. We would be happy if you think of it playfully – as a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk and explore the richness and wonders of language!

WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts — just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you can engage in a verbal quick-capture! The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but we have added the ability to mark and sort different lists of words important to educators. We have also integrated it with a few other functions, such as visualization of word thesaurus relationships (incorporating the amazing Visual Thesaurus® that we highly recommend in its own right) and Google® searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.

I just love this bit: We would be happy if you think of it playfully  … how exciting is that !!

Save The Words

 

Save The Words … What fun !! Just look at the amazing words you can try to define … love the sounds that go with it .

(Thanks to Tricia Neal for this)

Wordsmith’s Anagram builder

If you are an anagram ‘person’ then this site is surely for you. This is what they say for themselves:

Wordsmith is a worldwide online community of some half-million people who share a love for words, wordplay, language, and literature. They hail from Australia to Zimbabwe and almost all other places in between. Did you know that parliament is an anagram of partial men? Or, Clint Eastwood an anagram of Old West Action? Someone once said, “All the life’s wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie.” Here is your chance to discover the wisdom of anagrams.
Wordsmith.org was founded in 1994 by Anu Garg, while studying as a graduate student in computer science.

Thanks to John Sutton for this link.

I know its Christmas but …

… I will carry on posting news and ideas even if I am the only one reading them.

Today I find on Larry Ferlazzo’s site a nice little hangman game from Wordduck … the words you can use are in categories and you can add your own once you sign in.

This is what the site builders have to say for themselves:

This site has been created for people who love word games. We will be adding more games in the near future but we think you will find the many word lists that are currently available will keep you entertained for quite some time.

Wordle

If you love messing with text or you think the children you teach will love it try Wordle.

This is what they say about themselves:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.