There is one person who I would love to say a huge thankyou to. @bevevans22 is a source of inspiration to many different people. By following her blog my children have benefited greatly. This is a huge thankyou to Bev. 
I love fun and interesting places where children learn without realising it. This activity not only reinforced children’s spelling but different ICT skills as well. It all started from reading @bevevans22 blog http://technostories.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/word-art-creatures/. It inspired me to go and look at Bembo’s Zoo and see how I could then incorporate that into our Dinosaur theme.
Bembo’s Zoo is a site that where students can select a letter of the alphabet and then watch an animal’s name transform into the animal itself. Simple, yet effective.
First of all we looked at Bembo’s Zoo and looked at how the animals in the zoo have been made. I then showed the children Bev’s Blog and asked them how do you think those animals were made? What was it about the animals that Bev had made that made them really stand out and represent the animal? We then started talking about the different fonts on the computer and what we wanted to have. We decided that we needed to look for different fonts that would represent our animal, and then dinosaurs. There was a lot of discussion about the fact that some letters were capitals, some were lower case, the correct spelling of different words etc.
We decided to use a simple animal at first to create our first WordArt creature. The animal we chose was a lion.
Here is one of the results.
Next we moved to our unit of work ‘Dinosaurs’
We thought about whether we would make the dinosaur out of the letters for the word Dinosaur or the name of the dinosaur. We put it to a vote and the word Dinosaur won. I asked the children why they didn’t want to use the name of the dinosaur and the reply was that so many names were sooooooo long that they might get muddled with their spelling and with the copy/ paste that they needed to do for their dinosaur. Maths is also involved as the children flipped, turned and slid their letters into place.
