Word Magnets

Nik Peachey recently blogged about Word Magnets, a site I was instantly attracted to for teaching MFL. Basically this site enables you to make movable word labels without needing to use an IWB. The main drawback is that you can't save what you have done.

I wanted to use this to practise the perfect tense with Year 8, so saved a series of sentences in Word, for quick copying into the Word Magnets site during the lesson. I started off with just one short sentence at a time, then by the end of the lesson copied the whole of the text in and got students to form their own sentences from the vocabulary available. By then, it looked like this:

Word Magnet Example

I love the fact you can make the labels larger and colour code them do easily. Although you need to set this up ready for the lesson as it can't be saved, it actually turned out to be quite an advantage to do it in front of/with the students, as they were involved in thinking through which words were to be coloured and why.

I'm looking forward to using this now with all my classes and letting them have a go themselves setting challenges for partners in the ICT room.