“The Writing Bin II” is a collection of seven flexible and easy-to-use writing templates that allows educators to quickly develop guided and self selected reading and writing activities for students. Thirty finished activities are also available on the CD. Several documents are also included on the CD to provide further ideas on how to customize and enhance writing activities using the finished activities and templates in your classroom.

The initial “The Writing Bin” CD was the outgrowth of a vision first put forth by Susan Norwell, MS. ED who is a widely recognized international consultant on literacy development. Since the initial meeting and discussions a year and a half ago, Learning Magic, Inc. has worked with a wide range of teachers, therapists, parents and experts in the field in creating additional finished activities using the underlying templates found on both the original CD and now on “The Writing Bin II” CD.

The activities on “The Writing Bin II” CD cover a wide range of curricular areas. With that said, there is an emphasis on providing activities that revolve around the four seasons inclusive of activities that occur during that season as well as holidays. A second area of emphasis was on providing a number of life skills activities. We again have included activities from two outside independent consultants on this CD to provide further insights into how the underlying templates are being used in a wide variety of academic areas. Special thanks go to Phyl Macomber and Vicki Clarke for their participation in the creation of this CD.

At the core of “The Writing Bin II” CD 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 provide a student with an initial overview or reading assignment on the subject which they will then write about later.

An important feature of all the writing templates is a Pictures bank, which enables students to easily choose a photograph or graphic and insert it onto a writing page with one click of a button. They are then able to write about the picture individually or as a part of a story that they are creating, in the space provided on the page. Below you will see examples of the picture bank from two of the finished activities on the CD.

The ultimate goal of both “The Writing Bin” and “The Writing Bin II” CDs 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 screenshots below are from an activity entitled “Halloween Things” in which students write their own Halloween Story or write about things associated with Halloween. In the first screen, the student has clicked on the ‘Open Pictures’ button and then clicked on a picture of the moon and bats to place it on the page. The student then clicked on the Words button to display a toolbar of commonly used sight words. Note another toolbar on the left has also been displayed which has buttons that read “nouns”, “verbs” and “adjectives”.

The second screenshot on the right shows the toolbar that is displayed when the nouns button is clicked. The nouns displayed are directly related to the pictures in the ‘Open Pictures’ toolbar but can be easily changed if so desired.

If the student clicks on the verbs or adjectives buttons on the Parts of Speech toolbar then the appropriate toolbars will be displayed showing verbs and adjectives that could be used in the writing portion of the activity. If a student clicks on a word from any of the toolbars, that word will be inserted automatically into the textbox and provide support for their writing assignment.

Halloween Things: Verbs Toolbar

Halloween Things: Adjectives Toolbar

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: that in the top left portion of the screen there is a read page button. This button is built in to all of the writing templates and resulting activities. If the student clicks on that button, the words and sentences they have written will be read back to them. We have found in working with hundreds of students that this feature really helps students to catch their own spelling or grammatical errors. As a result students often go back and self correct their work before going onward with their writing assignment.

The medium level of scaffolding is implemented by supplying a set of two toggling toolbars that can hold up to eight words each. These could be any set of words, including the names of pictures, words with a certain onset or rime, 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 pictures that are provided on a pictures toolbar within an activity and which they insert onto a page. The only writing support is an on-screen keyboard. The spell check and word prediction/completion functions of IntelliTools Classroom Suite can be also used if appropriate for a student.

Additionally all of the templates and resulting activities have a "Record” button, so that students who can’t physically write could record their own thoughts regarding the photograph, graphic or storyline. In the following two screenshots you can see graphic images inserted on the page from two of the seasonal activities on “The Writing Bin II” CD.

Each of the three templates that have been outlined above also has an alternate version. Each of the alternative versions is inclusive of ten lead in content pages. These pages can be used for text, photos, videos and sound clips to introduce curricular content to students. (Note: the number of lead-in pages can be easily reduced or increased).

The text on each of the lead-in pages can be read by the student or they can click on a “Read Page” button to have the text read aloud to them. By clicking on the Read Page button they can have the text read aloud to them as many times as they need to improve their comprehension of the subject matter.

With these alternative versions of the three levels of support teachers, therapists, parents and other interested parties can choose from a complete spectrum of writing template formats to meet the needs of various students and present a wide variety of curricular materials to their students. In this way teachers or other curriculum designers can decide if a student or students need initial background material on a subject and how much.

The two screens below are lead in pages from “Signs of Fall” and “The Discovery”. Note that the background of the page is yellow, to easily identify the background content part of the activity. Note: Although the two illustrations below are photographs, the pages within “The Writing Bin II” CD are inclusive of a number of short videos as well.

For subject matter that may be too extensive for ten pages of lead-in content we have developed one more template. It is entitled the “Table of Contents” template. In this template we provide you with a standard Table of Contents page which you can divide the subject matter up into four topics or chapters.

In using the Table of Contents template for a number of different subjects, we have been able to provide students with “digestible” chunks of initial background content and then use any of the other Writing Bin II templates to create a corresponding writing activity for students in the classroom.

Here are two screenshots from “The Check Ups” activity which is one of the finished activities on ‘The Writing Bin II’ CD. The first screenshot is of the Table of Contents Page and the second one is of one of the lead-in reading pages in Chapter 3. In this activity students read about the veterinary office and then follow a cockatiel, dog and a cat through their annual check-ups.

The students then have the opportunity to write about the check-ups using a secondary activity that was developed using the “Writing With Words” template. (i.e. The Check-ups Writing).

The following two screenshots are illustrations of what the writing experience is like for students using the second writing activity.

The Check-Ups Writing: Cockatiel

The Check-Ups Writing: X-Rays