Graduation Gifts

Have you ever noticed that picture frames LIE? When a frame says it holds a 5x7 picture, what it usually means is, "I'm sure you didn't really want to remember the stuff around the edges! If it was really important, you should have gotten a bigger frame!" This has recently been an issue while preparing for the 8th grade graduation.

The 8th graders graduating is a big deal at St. Mary School. We really want them to know that we will miss them next year! The 7th graders play a big part in helping us send them off to high school on a good note. As the 7th grade advisor, I have been busy helping my students plan the banquet. I spent some time at the Dollar Tree looking for decorations on Sunday. I found some graduation picture frames to use for the place settings at the banquet. Inside the frames, I put a word cloud I made at Tagul.com. The seventh graders helped by going around to various students and staff at St. Mary's and asking for adjectives to describe the 8th graders. I told them to write down every adjective, even repeats. the cool thing about Tagul is the more a word is used, the bigger it appears in the cloud. 

I typed the adjectives (and some nouns) into a word document. So the names would be the biggest words in the cloud, I typed the student's name three times. Then copied and pasted the list into the tag source at Tagul. Then I made the colors as close as possible to the class colors the students had picked (tropical blue and tropical green). Finally, I saved the files on my computer so they could be printed, which brings me back to my earlier point. 

The first time I printed the clouds, I made them 5x7 because the frames were 5x7 frames. BIG MISTAKE. The edges of the cloud were cut off! I also didn't have the box checked for the picture to fit in the frame. Anyway, when I printed them as 4x6 prints, they worked perfectly!