Below, you will find 10 sentences about the blue whale. Unfortunately, the words are mixed up. Can you put them in the correct order? (You will probably need a pen and a piece of paper for this).
Number one:
Number two:
Number three:
Number four (in this case, the word ‘as‘ must be used twice):
Number five:
Number six:
Number seven:
Number eight (in this case, the word ‘the‘ must be used twice):
Number nine:
Number ten:
Check your answers by listening to the following clip:
This activity, which can be used to revise the language from this TEFLclips lesson plan, can be downloaded as a pdf file here: 
blue-whale-jumbled-sentences.pdf
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These word images were created with Wordle.net. In a previous posting, I wrote about how this application can be used to create Word Clouds of jokes, articles, song lyrics, etc (see posting here). But here we see that it is also excellent for jumbling up the words in short texts such as individual sentences, lines from songs, quotations, phrases, slogans or questions:
(This question is taken from a true and false game that you can play with your students - see here).
One disadvantage: As can be seen from blue whale facts 4 and 8 above (”Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant” and “It is one of the fastest animals in the sea“), when a word is repeated in the text, it will not be repeated in the Wordle image.
6 responses so far ↓
1 leozeh // Dec 14, 2008 at 1:55 am
Hi Jamie,
Just to let you know that I used wordle in my class before and it really works. Even though here in Canada we don’t have e-boards (what a shame!), I was able to save the pictures into Word and then make copies.
We did a whole song only using wordle pictures and they had to come up with the lyrics just by looking at the words.
What an amazing tool!
Cheers
2 mara // Dec 15, 2008 at 2:11 pm
it’s so in Italy,we don’t have e- board but I used copies so the children(age seven) can cut and stick.
3 admin // Dec 15, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Hello Leo and Mara
I used the ’screen capture’ function on my keyboard to create a slideshow of the Wordle images (this is how I made the pdf file of the 10 whale facts). You probably already know how to do this. But I just discovered the function quite recently and I find it very useful. I’m going to show how this is done on a posting later (either today or tomorrow).
Thanks for the comments
Jamie
4 leo // Dec 16, 2008 at 6:15 am
thanks Jamie.
I’m looking forward to that!
5 Lindsay // Dec 16, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Hi Jamie
Good stuff - I’ve just starting subscribing to your blog now that I’ve got my own. Wordle… what a great tool! I’m going to use this in the new year. Hey, check out sixthings.net - I’d like to invite you to submit your own list for it in the new year, something like Jamie Keddie’s Six… (insert whatever here - six favourite youtube clips whatever). Interested?
6 Jeremy // Dec 18, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Hi Jamie,
I’ve just discovered Wordle as well. What a great resource! You mention the disadvantage of the words only appearing once, but if a word appears more than once it is larger than the other words. The more often a word is repeated, the larger the word. Have a look at http://www.jeremytaylor.eu/football_friends.htm and scroll down to the wordle, click on it to see it properly. (I love the Burnt Cheese font!). Rather than making a pdf, I use the screen capture then using ACDSee I made a jpeg image from what was on the clipboard. You can do the same with Photoshop Elements (and I presume most other photo manipulation software).
Keep up the great work!
Jeremy
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