Activities

Jumbled texts
A brief piece of writing can be presented on screen with the words, lines or sentences in the wrong order. A child or group of children re-organises the text. This enables children who are slow writers to make meaningful choices about language and develop their knowledge and control. Their decisions about word order or sentence order will challenge and enrich their comprehension of the text without spending time copying it out.

Resource Sheet 1 Tiger jumbled (Word document: Right click, Save as...)

This document presents 12 lines of Blake’s poem in the wrong order. Use drag and drop editing to ‘pull’ the lines to the correct places. This is a much easier process for children than ‘cutting’ text and ‘pasting’ it to a different part of the screen, although you may need to use these techniques if your word processor does not support ‘dragging and dropping.’

Resource Sheet 2 Tiger Lines Punctuation (Word document: Right click, Save as...)

This sheet presents several stanzas of the same poem without line-breaks or punctuation. Put in the line breaks and punctuation as appropriate. Reorganising a text in this way challenges our understanding of the meaning, sequence, form and pattern of the poem.

Resource Sheet 3 Tiger original (Word document: Right click, Save as...) presents William Blake’s poem unedited. Did you get it right?

Cumulative writing
Each person has a slip of paper (for example, Resource sheet 4: Story Starters) with a story starter sentence on it. Ask them to type it on one of the computers and carry on writing the story on their own. Use an egg-timer or your watch to allow a short period of writing time (say 2 minutes.) Then call ‘all change’ at which point each person moves to a different machine and continues whatever story they find there. Change three or four times, then read out/discuss results. 

This can also be a useful starter activity for a class in a computer suite. It rapidly generates a large volume of text which can be explored and edited later. Children can also use the same activity by ‘taking turns’ with a single computer if that is all that is available. It involves a great deal of reading, especially looking at context and style, before each child writes the next section. The text can be used as a source for proof-reading and re-drafting activities, using spell-checkers and a Thesaurus.