One Day, Lily, One Day and Tagul

"One Day, Lily, One Day" is one of my favorite stories in the anthology. It is set in 1960 and explores the confusion and mixed emotions of a young white girl whose parents are supportive of the black South Africans (called Africans or natives in the story). Her father is jailed for his efforts and she encounters difficulty at school with other children whose parents are not sympathetic to the cause.

For this assignment, I used the reading comprehension strategy of determining importance. As I read, I kept a list of phrases and words that I felt were important to the story. I then used the list to create a word cloud in Tagul.



I also customized the cloud to include many of the colors from the South African flag. Even though it didn't exist it 1960, I thought it was a fun and colorful way to personalize the cloud!

I think word cloud tools like Tagul and Wordle are great for helping students determine importance or analyze the theme of a piece of writing. Teachers might choose to use this assignment as is, or to create a word cloud for the students by copying and pasting an entire story (or passage) into one of the tools. Students could use the word cloud to make predictions and analyze the text in a visual way. In addition to promoting comprehension, I think these types of tools can increase visual literacy skills.

There are a few differences between Tagul and Wordle. Both are free. Wordle is more simple (and student friendly) while Tagul is more sophisticated. Wordle allows you to save your cloud to a gallery or print, while Tagul saves your work in your own account and lets you embed the cloud in a web page or blog. I'd recommend experimenting with both to determine which tool will best meet your students' needs.