Sharing The Hay

This activity was specifically developed to aid an elementary school child who was having trouble sharing food in his classroom and in a lunchroom setting. The child struggled not only in sharing his own food, but would consistently reach over and take food from other children who were seated next to him.

In talking with his teacher prior to the start of summer school, we discussed the problem and also the fact that one of the student's favorite things to do was to go to a local farm where he loved to watch, pet and be around the large farm animals.

As a result, we developed the "Sharing The Hay" activity which shows, through a series of photographs and short videos, the different animals on the farm "eating and sharing hay". In the activity cows, goats, horses, sheep and even llamas are shown eating and sharing.

The teacher and parents also reinforced the concepts through several visits to nearby farms, petting zoos and talking about the importance of sharing in the summer school's settings.

In the activity itself, after looking at the pictures and short videos, the student is then asked to write about the different animals and their eating/sharing.

When students click on a picture, it is automatically inserted onto the page, and they then get to write about what they remembered or learned. Pop-up toolbars of sight words, plus nouns, verbs and adjectives that were used in the Crawfish Festival Adventure activity are also available to assist students in their writing endeavors.

In initially talking with the teacher about the child's writing abilities, we decided to use one of the templates from the recently released The Writing Bin CD to provide writing support through the series of toolbars that are built into the Content Lead In Scaffolded template.

Note: the number of verbs provided for writing Included more verbs than were in the actual lead-in content section of the activity. This was done on purpose as the teacher was also trying to get the child to understand and apply the concepts of slowing down, properly chewing and swallowing food.

The teacher recently reported back that the child's behavior is much improved (albeit not perfect). Additionally the teacher has also stated that he loves the writing portion of the activity, and has used the activity to rewrite the story of how animals share their food on a number of occasions.

The teacher also mentioned that the child continues to add more and more of his own vocabulary to the story (i.e. retelling the story with slight variations). Although this activity is not a cure-all for all woes, it has been helpful when used as a tool to help teach the concept of sharing, etc.

If you own a copy of IntelliTools Classroom Suite, you could also easily change or expand the textual content to meet the needs of students at different reading levels 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.