The Exploring Nature Collection

for older students

produced by Learning Magic, Inc.

in collaboration with Creative Communicating (Pati King-DeBaun).

What's in the Exploring Nature Collection
from Learning Magic, Inc. and Creative Communicating?

Each Adapted Stories collection includes ten study units. This new Exploring Nature Collection targets older, developmentally delayed students (grade 3 and up) who for whatever reason are just beginning to learn to read. However, the materials are also appropriate for younger beginning readers. The content of the units include themes, facts, story plots, and graphics to catch the interest of this older age group while being engaging for younger students as well. The reading books and writing activities are valuable to any student just learning to read. Each of the units has three main components for emergent literacy: Learn About It, Read About It, and Write About It.

The Learn About It component introduces students to a topic to explore. For the Exploring Nature Collection, Learning Magic, Inc. has created interactive adventure stories for each unit. Multimedia elements and full-color photos add vivid reality to these virtual environments.

The Read About It component includes three on-computer stories: one with simple easy to read text, one with more difficult text for students beginning to read, and one for conventional readers. The themes and vocabulary for these stories relate back to the adventure story for each unit. Full-color photos and in some cases added sounds make these stories special.

The Write About It component includes a selection of writing activities, including word play and errorless writing, as well as story-based activities. Off-computer materials to print round out each study unit.

For more specific information on each of the ten units of Exploring Nature, click the DOWNLOAD button to download a PDF file listing the ten titles with a brief description of each. Then continue down this page to see screen shots of what is included in a single study unit, African Photo Safari.

Components of a Study Unit

Each study unit has a wealth of both on- and off-computer materials. Let's take a quick tour of a typical unit, African Photo Safari. Keep in mind that each unit contains analogous materials: the adventure story and comprehension exercise, three on-computer books plus a cloze activity, wordplay and writing activities, and off-computer printable versions of the books plus supporting materials including vocabulary cards.

Learn About It

For Learn About It, students can explore the African savanna in an interactive format. The Photo Safari Adventure story has eight possible outcomes. Students begin by deciding whether they want to go first to the grassland area or to the water hole. Either way, they will meet many animals and learn something about each of them from the narrator who serves as their guide. On each page, students read, and have read aloud to them, a paragraph leading to two choices. They click a button to control what happens next. The stories are based on the Learning Magic Adventures in Reading template, with vocabulary appropriate to this group of students. After they explore, their comprehension can be checked with an activity based on the Learning Magic 2 Button Template from the Cause & Effect and BEYOND CD.

Read About It

Read About It includes computer books on three levels, with photos and themes drawn from the African Photo Safari Adventure story.

"African Animals" is the simplest story, and the recorded text is automatically read aloud.

Who Is It? has a slightly more complex vocabulary, and the story for conventional readers is Life In The Savanna. The latter two stories must be read silently by the students.

Write About It

The Write About It component includes a selection of word play activities such as this one using rimes and onsets, errorless writing using words and images from the books, and conventional writing using an onscreen keyboard if needed.

Data Collection

If you are using the Exploring Nature Collection with the full version of IntelliPics Studio 3® and IntelliTalk 3® or with IntelliTools Classroom Suite®, you can take advantage of activities from all three main components of each unit which have data collection built in. The cloze activity which tests if children are actually reading the conventional level story, several of the word play activities, and the comprehension activity all record student responses for inclusion in an automatically generated report. The comprehension activity buttons keep track of the student's choices behind the scenes, as do the answer fields in the cloze and word play activities.