Creating New Activities

My next step was to create high cognitive activities that was going to engage my lower level learners. I began with a reading group. These students are reading at Level 3 so they are well below the National Standard for Year 2.

I first sat down and discussed with this group what sort of activities they enjoyed doing on Explain Everything. Everyone of them said they enjoyed recording themselves. So I set about photographing each page of a book. I then typed up the text for each page and scrambled the words and punctuation around. I wanted them to form a complete sentence and then record themselves reading the sentence.
Next I created some pages for work on some of the high frequency words to consolidate their learning and I finished the activity with a picture.

Problem: They could not read my instructions, even though I had typed the instructions in the simplest of language. So I went back in and I recorded all instructions using garage band and inserted them into Explain Everything.

This worked well. The students really enjoyed the activity and the best thing of all I was not interrupted when I was reading with another group because they could follow my verbal instructions. It does take time to create these activities but I know I will get quicker as I continue.