Elementary, Language Arts (English)

3-6

Star Office, StarImpress

The children become the author by writing the words to tell the story of a wordless book. They also will share with a younger class. We shared with our kindergarten buddies.

Adams 12 Technology Skills Continuum Standard #2: Students use technology tools to enhance learning, increase productivity, and promote creativity.
- Begins using touch typing with home keys.
- Independently uses spell check and thesaurus.
- Changes character formatting such as font color.
- Utilizes different document layouts. (i.e. newsletter, etc.)
- Changes document formatting such as: alignment, bulleted/numbered lists, borders, line spacing, margins, etc.
- Uses import/export and copy/paste features to create a single document using more than one program.

Students will critically look at pictures and be able to tell a coherent story that has good word choice and sentence fluency.

After finishing their stories, students will be assessed using a rubric designed to score word choice, sentence fluency and conventions.

Knowledge of how to add text boxes to slides. It is not a hard skill to teach. Also knowledge of changing background and effects would be helpful, but not necessary. It is also an easy teach.

You need to pick a wordless book, scan the pictures, save them as jpeg files, drop the pictures into your teacher folder, and then prepare a slide show with the pictures using StarImpress. After accomplishing that, drop the slide show into each student's folder.

4 class periods. 45 Min. per class.

In the classroom, share the wordless book with students and have them try writing the words for a couple of pages. Share a few and talk about word choice and sentence fluency. Before the students start adding their words have them watch the slide show without words on the large screen, and share and discuss the grading rubric.

Have students open their slide show and do two of the slides together so they get the idea of how to add the text. Also discuss how these would be graded on the rubric. (They may begin the story with the words we come up with as a class or choose to do their own.) As they work stop periodically and have them save and share one of their slides.

As they finish, have them get a partner, share their slide show with each other and make comments as to revision and editing using their rubrics. They should be sitting with each other to do this task--the writer presenting to the reviewer, the reviewer and the presenter talking about editing and revising. After each has a turn, have them work alone again to finish their presentation.

When they believe their presentation is in final form they may change the background and font sizes if they wish. After this they will ask a different person to review their work---mostly for editing purposes at this time. As the culminating activity we brought our kindergarten buddies in and read the story to them.

An example of one page without words. (Each page of the book was scanned and saved in each students work area.) This book was Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher by Molly Bang. You can get a list of the many wordless books that are available from your media center specialist.

These are two finished slides from the wordless book Grey Lady and The Strawberry Snatcher by Molly Bang

I would definitely start with an easier wordless book. I also would probably have my lower writers work in pairs, so that I could talk to them more often.