Signs of Spring

This activity was originally created for a classroom of older students who are functioning at or around a second grade level from a literacy standpoint.

We initially discussed with the students what were different signs of Spring's arrival. Some of their thoughts were quite revealing as you will see.

I then took photos of different subjects and we used them along with sentences on each page that begin with the words, In the Spring,...
 

This provides a contextual reading content piece first for the students along with real life representations of "Signs of Spring".

Once the students have read through the eight pages, they then get the opportunity to write about similar pictures using a template from our "The Writing Bin" CD.

They simply click on a picture from a toolbar to put it on page and then write about it.

There is an additional "Words" toolbar with sixteen writing words to assist them in their work. They can also click on a Read Page button to listen to their writing and edit it appropriately. They can also record their response to the picture if they are not physically able to write.

Please note due to the fact that we had a number of students on the autism spectrum within the class, we chose to use slightly different pictures in the toolbar than the ones used on the reading content pages. By giving them slightly different images of the same concept we have found anecdotally that students with autism are often able to generalize information better.

This activity I believe could be used from the second grade upward based upon the words used within the textboxes and the length of the sentences. Of course you can change the text to meet specific student needs as well.

This activity was built in Classroom Suite v. 3.2. The activity can be run on the ITAN Player. But IntelliPics Studio 3® is needed to perform data capture, automatic grading and portfolio management, as well as any editing or changes to the activity itself.