"The Writing Bin" is a collection of seven easy-to-use and flexible writing templates that allow educators to quickly develop guided as well as self-selected writing activities for students. Over thirty finished activities are also available on the CD along with insights on how the activities can be used in the classroom to enhance creative writing.

The Writing Bin CD is the outgrowth of a vision first expressed by Susan Norwell, MS. ED, to Learning Magic at the 2006 CTG conference. Susan is an internationally recognized consultant who has worked with a wide range of children for the past twenty-three years. Susan saw a need for a collection of easy to use templates as well as finished activities that would allow educators to create and use self-selected writing activities with their students.

Based upon that initial concept, Learning Magic, Inc. continued to work with Susan and an expanded number of educators and industry experts in building a series of writing templates to provide teachers with several different levels of scaffolding (i.e. vocabulary support) for students at different cognitive or writing levels. Additionally, field testing and research was done simultaneously to ascertain what subject or content areas should be addressed in the initial finished activities.

At the core of "The Writing Bin" are two sets of templates, each with a gradually reduced level of scaffolding. One set includes, in addition to scaffolding, a set of lead-in pages that can be used to give a student background on the subject.

An important feature of all these writing templates is a Pictures Bank, which enables students to easily choose a photo or other graphic with one click for each page. They are then ready to write, using whatever scaffolding is included in that template and the resulting finished activity. This variety of template formats provides a flexible system that can be used in many different curriculum areas. For example, we see here the Pictures Bank from Hubble Telescope, a science activity, and from How Are You?, a life skills activity about emotions which could be used at higher grade levels.

The ultimate goal was to develop a systematic approach whereby we could educate students to a point where they no longer needed support or scaffolding to write. With that as a goal, we developed a series of templates that at each level would be devoid of one more layer of scaffolding.

The next set of four screens is from Writing with W's, an activity in which students work with words beginning with W. In the first of these screens, a student has inserted a clip art picture of a wizard from the Pictures Bank, and opened the parts of speech categories toolbar. Clicking these three buttons toggles the three parts of speech wordbanks. The three specific parts of speech toolbars are color-coded for easy identification. In the next three screens, the student opens the blue Nouns toolbar, then the green Verbs toolbar, and then the purple Adjectives toolbar.

The medium level of scaffolding is implemented by supplying a set of two toggling toolbars that can hold eight words each. These could be any set of words, including the names of the pictures, words with a certain onset, a vocabulary list, or words relating to a topic. While there are two toolbars by default, adding a third toolbar would be easy to do. This is a very flexible template for students who need a little vocabulary support.

The least amount of scaffolding has students writing about the inserted pictures in their own words, with only the onscreen keyboard for support if needed. The spell check and/or word prediction functions of Classroom Suite might also be used. Additionally, all templates include a Record button, so that students who cannot physically write could record their thoughts. In the following two examples, we see the writing pages created using the two Picture Banks described earlier, for the How Are You? book and the Hubble Telescope activity. This open-ended format can be used at various academic levels, as well as for widely varying subject areas.

Each of the three templates above has an alternate version, with ten added lead-in pages. These pages can be used for text, photos, and movie content about a topic, as well as to give students specific writing assignments to be carried out on the following writing pages. The text on the lead-in pages can either be read by the student or the student can click on a 'Read Page' button to have the page read aloud to them. With this alternative version for each of the three levels of support, teachers can choose from a complete spectrum of writing template formats to meet the needs of various students and present many different types of curriculum. They can decide if students need background material and how much, or they might decide not to have any lead-in for some topics.

The two screens below are of lead-in pages from the Hadiah and Fort Clatsop activities. Note that the background of the page is yellow, to easily identify the background content part of the activity. Also notice that the Fort Clatsop page has a movie as well as a photo. This option for the lead-in pages provides a powerful alternate way to present content.

For more complex subject matter, the lead-in pages might not be adequate for giving students the background information they need in order to write about it. One more template included with The Writing Bin is designed to fill this need. This is the TOC, or Table of Contents template. It provides a standard Table of Contents page with four topics, and four buttons leading to the beginning of each topic. These might also be used for chapters in a long story. Students would read and re-read the material presented in the TOC template. Then they would use a writing template with the appropriate level of scaffolding to write in their own words about the subject. The writing template Pictures Bank would be loaded with photos from the TOC activity so that students could insert and write about them.

Here is the table of contents page from The Antagonist, a story about the interactions between a cat (Jake) and a dog (Cooper). Movies in this four-chapter story let students judge who is really the antagonist. The page with the photo of Cooper is the first page of that chapter or topic. Note that the back arrow is grayed out on this page to prevent students from accidentally wandering back into the previous chapter, and losing the thread of the story.

The more examples we create, the more ideas we come up with for using the templates and modifying the finished activities! We share these with you in the documentation for The Writing Bin. There are integrated sets of activities, sets of stories and pictures to use for a story re-telling exercise, and more. One bonus set includes a folder of new adventure stories, using the non-linear, choose your own route template from our Adventures in Reading CD, each paired with a journal using one of the Writing Bin templates.

The two screens below are from the Tour of London Adventure, and the Tour of London Journal activities. Students would go through the Tour of London Adventure first, choosing either the red or yellow button from each page to go to the next location. After they have seen the sights, they would be ready to write an account of their explorations, using the Tour of London Journal which was developed in the Scaffolded template. Here a student has the Nouns toolbar open to use in writing about the first part of the tour.

All the activities and templates are accessible to students using switches, both single and dual.

In addition, custom IntelliKeys® overlays for each type of template are included and attached. Here is the overlay from the Writing - Scaffolded templates, both with and without lead-in pages.