WordArt Vocab Lesson
I was browsing around some of the emerging blogs on our new blog server and found a description of a simple but powerful vocabulary lesson using word on the New School Tech blog. It reminded me of an ELD lesson that I used to do back in the day where I had students create words out of images. After finding the image and then imbedding it in the word using wordart I found that they learned the word easily. It also allowed us to print them all out and create a very colorful word wall. The kids loved it. So I send Dawn an e-mail and showed her an example. I knew once she saw it I had her hooked. I planned to write up a little how to and send it to her, but then I realized that there may be other liaisons out there that would like to try this one with their studnets. So I am posting it here. You can use this lesson for a lot more than ELD. It is a great way to combine images and words for various reasons. I also used to do this with student faces in their names. I actually did this with my wife’s class a few weeks ago. It is a great beginning of the year activity, and always helped me to remeber student names. Anyway here it is. This was done in Office 2003 because I figured that is the version that most of you are using. If you use a Mac or if you have another version of office, it is pretty much the same process. If you use it with your studnets, send me a few examples of their work. Here is the How-to doc in PDF format. -D
First download the picture to your computer that you want to embed in your WordArt
Open a new Word Document and change the layout to be landscape in “page setup” from the file menu.
Change the Margins for Top, Bottom, Left, and right all to .25 in this same page setup window.
Open “Word Art” by clicking the Insert menu, hover over Picture, and click on the Word Art button in the side menu.
Select a style and click OK.
Type the text and select a font. More of the picture will be visible if you choose a font that is made out of thicker lines, and then click OK.
Select your WordArt and drag the corners and edges to make it fill the page.
When you select the WordArt it will have the little black squares in the corners that you can drag to resize it. The WordArt toolbar will also appear. Click the “Format WordArt” button. It is the one that has a paintbrush.
Click the color drop down arrow and select “Fill Effects.”
Click the “Picture” tab at the right, then click the “Select Picture” button.
Browse to the picture file that you have saved on the computer, and select it. You can still make changes to the fonts and text by double clicking in the middle of the WordArt.
