Creating Character Trait Word Clouds to Study Synonyms and Antonyms

We've been spending a lot of time recently analyzing the various characters in the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio that we've been reading.  I noticed that many of the traits that the students have been listing were very similar and repetitive.  It got me thinking that students are probably limited in the number of character traits that they actually know!  (Duh!)  So...

1. I found a wonderful list of character traits on Read-Write-Think (click here) that I highlighted.
2. I taught my students how to use tagul.com, which is a word cloud generator (see images above).
3. I also taught my students how to use thesaurus.com as a way to find synonyms and antonyms for a word.
4. Each student chose a word from the list (and its natural antonym) and created a word cloud for it using the synonyms that were listed on thesaurus.com - They clicked on their preferred antonym and used the synonyms from that word's list for their second word cloud.  
5. Finally, I asked that my students submit their word clouds to me via a form that I posted on our website (scroll down to the bottom of the page to see it).

Here is what we ended up with: http://psolarz.weebly.com/character-traits-thesaurus.html

I think that this 75-minute activity was a good exercise in thinking, because I asked them to delete any words or phrases that they did not know, or did not accurately reflect the definition of the word.   They also had to decide on an antonym that was as close to the opposite of the original word as they could come up with.  Finally, they had to remember (or use their notes that they took) to do all of the technology pieces of the activity.  By the end, my students told me that they were mentally drained, but that they enjoyed the activity.  Exactly what I hoped for!!!

Now we can use this list whenever we are analyzing the character traits of someone in the stories that we read!

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