Somewhere to begin

After a couple of weeks giving my students time to experiment with the different options available some things have become clear.

Firstly, it is so important to follow up with repetition once you have taught students a routine in Explain Everything. For example, once you get them import a photo you need to make sure that you do it for a couple of days afterwards otherwise you will never end up getting past the 'learning to use the app' stage.

Saying that, students are very quick to pick up tasks and will become hard to manage if you don't have another step for them to go to the next day.

I think after 5 weeks I am at the stage where my students are becoming familiar enough with the app to be able to start independent work without constant teacher monitoring. A few examples below so the starting point of the types of activities that I have started with. Please note that these examples are a starting point and also given to the students at a time when they are still learning to use the app.

This is an example of a slide for the book Hoppity Hop which is a Magenta PM reader. In this activity the student has to put the words in order from page 2, including punctuation. This focuses on sentence structure. It may potentially be a little to hard to include the punctuation and may need more scaffolding for the students to complete this page.

This slide is taken from a project created for The Picnic Boat which is a Green PM reader. This introduces the idea of speech marks and the right places in which they are placed. This is copied straight off p5 of the reader. This worked well and the particular students completed this activity easily so a follow up activity where they were given a foreign text and had to place the speech marks would have been beneficial.