theme

School is starting, and one of your first duties has to do with choosing a theme!

Theme selection is one of those tasks that is fun for some and a chore for others. The challenge is always trying to come up with a new, fresh idea that really represents the students at your school. To that end, here are a few helpful hints:
Start on the Herff Jones Resources page.

There are a number of theme resources there including lesson plans that teach what a theme is and a list of themes to either choose from or help generate ideas.
Try to avoid the overtired, overused, overworked themes.

Especially those that have to do with movies, TV, and music. And by all means run screaming from the room if anyone on your staff suggests the idea of each headline in the book being the name of a TV show, movie, or song. This is a guaranteed one way ticket to insanity for a yearbook adviser.

Have a scavenger hunt.

For homework this week have every staff member search through magazines, junk mail, college recruiting materials, and the mall for theme ideas. They can look at verbal phrases and graphic ideas. Have them bring their favorites to share with the class.

Try Wordle.net.

An important note about Wordle.net. This can be a fun place to go to create your word cloud, but please be advised that some of the word clouds saved to the Wordle gallery are NOT appropriate for students. The latest created word clouds also appear randomly on the home page, so please be aware that unsuitable content could show up there as well. You can link directly to the CREATE page. That page and your results page will only display safe content. Wordle may be blocked by your school filters because of this as well. The site creator is searching for ways to make this neat tool more teacher friendly.

This could be a blast. Send out staffers to interview people in your school. Ask them questions like:

* What is the best thing about our school?
* What do people say about our students?
* Describe our school in three words.

Obviously you want to focus on the more positive and serious responses that you get.

Type all the responses (NOT the questions) as a big old text file in a word processing program. Then copy the block of text into Wordle.net to create your very own word cloud of the responses.

At the top of this post is a word cloud created from this article.


What can you do with this, you ask? First of all the words that are repeated most in the answers will be the largest in the cloud. You can use those words as jumping off points for a theme. The largest word could simply BE your theme. OR Maybe you could use the word cloud AS your theme for this year. It would be a graphic theme and you could pull specific words from the cloud to title your sections. If you want to do something like that and are planning to use the cloud as artwork, be sure to print your word cloud to show me. Our art department will be able to reproduce the artwork in a quality that can be used on a yearbook cover.

Be sure to leave a comment if you have questions.