Building a Positive Class with Character Trait Word Clouds

This year, I am trying to do things that will keep our classroom positive and happy, so I thought I would connect some of the academic ideas we are learning with a bit of team building fun.  So as we wrapped up our unit on character traits (you can read about exactly what we did here), I had the students think about the traits that their classmates embodied.

So, this is totally made up, but you get the idea ;)

I created a form on Google Forms that included each of my students' names.  (I made each entry a "short answer" question)  I then asked the students to think of 3 POSITIVE adjectives that described their fellow classmates and input that into the form.   I wanted them specifically to think of inside traits that we had learned about in our character unit, as outside traits were a bit too obvious.  To help the students really dig deeper on the character traits,  I projected this character trait list from Read. Write. Think onto the board.  I also added several unique character traits about each student, as well as their name about 10 times (which will become important later on.)

Once all of the forms were submitted, I created an individual doc for each

student with all of the adjectives listed.  Using the "Save as Doc" add-on in Chrome, the individual doc was easy to create.  I then shared it from my drive to the student who it belonged to.

The students then copied and pasted all of the words into a word cloud form from ABCYa.com.  This generated a cloud with all of the character traits that their classmates used to describe them.   This word cloud takes the words that appear more than once and makes them bigger than others, so the student's name should appear the most on the doc.  After taking a screenshot and inserting it into a Google Slide, the students took a selfie and added that on top of the slide.  

I made this about myself.  Look at all the positive words I used ;)

I printed the slides out, laminated, and now we have a gorgeous display with hundreds of positive character traits to describe our class!