Among the Hidden

Our 5th graders will be reading Among The Hidden. I asked the 5th grade team if they would be willing to try a technique that I learned at an NCCAT conference in October. Using the word cloud generator, Tagxedo, I pasted all the words from the story. Luckily, I found a pdf online. Tagxedo, which only opens in Firefox, eliminates all the "extra words" such as "the", "and", "a", etc. leaving only the important words. The larger the words, the more often they appear in the story. The students will work in partnerships or small groups and examine the words. They will make predictions about the story and the characters based on the words they see. They will use a Google Drawing that has been pre-made with a template to answer these questions:

• Based on the words in the word cloud, what can you predict about this book?

• What words make you curious or surprise you? What do you think they mean?

• Choose 5 or more words and create a sentence (or more) that might summarize the story for someone who hasn’t read it.

Students will then decorate the Google Drawing to reflect what they think the story will be about and then share their drawing using Padlet; allowing other students to comment on their predictions.

**Working more explicitly with the 5th grade team is part of one of my goals for this year.**