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I saw a Wordle on Lisa Albert Rondinelli's blog and thought it was so cool! What's a Wordle, you ask? (Or maybe you don't ask. Maybe these are all over the blogosphere, and I'm the last person on Earth to have heard of them!) Well, it's a word cloud based on text that you paste in.

Here, for instance, is the Wordle for my 50 State Poems collection.

Isn't that nifty? You go to Wordle.net and paste in your manuscript, your favorite song, an article, whatever, and it generates the cloud. The Wordle is almost like a poem based on your text, to me. In fact, I can think of several cool poem activities based on it. For instance, what if you had to write a found poem from this Wordle, and you could only move from word to another word it touched?

I wrote this one thinking of the flooding going on in surrounding states right now, when the river that was a happy resident of a town suddenly becomes an attacker:
  
River storms American towns
Water flows north
Rain makes prairie waves

OK, I cheated a little on the last line because "makes" doesn't actually touch "prairie." But it's a game, right? Poetry is playing with words, and this is a fun way to do it.

It's also a cool way to capture some of the essence of your longer work in one image. Have fun!

Author: Lisa M. Chalifoux
Illustrator: Heather Castles
Published: 2008 Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1425155472 Trafford.com Amazon.com

What could be more giggle-inducing than recognizing our own human foibles in a pair of sweet and spunky turtles? With its slapstick, smiles and airy, upbeat illustrations, this simple story helps us laugh at the silliness of squabbles and invites us to find a better way.

You can sneak a peek at the whole book on Heather Castles’ blog, here!

More turtles on JOMB:

• Nanabosho: How the Turtle Got Its Shell
• Tudley Didn’t Know