List Poem/Shape Poem

I found a cool website thanks to teacher blogger at 4th Grade Frolics.  She made word clouds for Earth Day on http://www.tagxedo.com/  Check out her post here:
http://4thgradefrolics.blogspot.com/2012/04/earth-day-follow-up.html

I thought this would be a great beginning of the year activity for students to do a list poem about themselves and then customize the shape and colors to fit their personality.  Here are 2 samples I did for Sophi and Colin;

Another great tool to transform student writing into a shape is http://www.festisite.com/text-layout/#2,0.  They have a few options to turn your text into shapes.  It works best with a paragraph or two.  Read the post here at Easy Ed Tech Blog about how they wrote a paragraph about a mom and put it in the shape of a heart.  Festisite also has spiral shpaes, banners, mazes and a rebus creater!!  Very cool for your kids you want to write in code!