Firefighters Writing

Susan Norwell is the author of this activity. She was one of the original people who suggested to Learning Magic that we develop a series of activities and templates to serve classrooms as a "Writing Bin" to provide children with self-selected writing opportunities. This parallels the need for self-selected reading books, which Learning Magic has been working on for several years.

In response to Susan's request, we have been working on a series of easy to use templates that would allow teachers to insert basic information about a subject through pictures, video and text and then provide a rich environment in which children could write about what they had learned or read.

Susan took one of the prototype templates and immediately produced this beautiful writing activity for children on the subject of firefighters. In the first six pages Susan provides information regarding firefighters and what they do on a day-to-day basis to keep us safe. She then provides the child with a choice of eight photos to write about. Clicking an "Insert Pictures" button in the template provides the eight photos on a toolbar.

When the child chooses a picture, it is automatically inserted into the page, the toolbar closes, and the child is presented with a textbox where they can write about the firefighter photo . An on-screen keyboard is also available to provide extra support for writing in case the student needs that assistance, and there is a custom IntelliKeys® overlay.

See further details about this project in What's New under "In the Works". We welcome your feedback on this prototype ond the other three Goodies based on this concept, Fort Clatsop Writing, State Fair Writing, and On the Farm Writing.

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. Required Software: IntelliTools Classroom Suite® v. 3.2 .