2. Chunking unfamiliar sounds and words If students have developed some proficiency with phonemes, they can begin chunking unfamiliar words. This principle spurred another digital idea/activity •
Open up PowerPoint or Keynote and type in one vocabulary word per slide.
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Choose the biggest font and bright colors that you can.
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Save the PowerPoint or Keynote as JPEGS (thus converting your slides into images).
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Go to www.jigsawplanet.com and click on the word “create.”
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Upload your image. This will create an interactive jigsaw puzzle for you.
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Feeling pretty good? Grab images from Discovery Education and insert them as backgrounds for your slides to create great imagery for your jigsaw.
In addition to covering up parts of the words that they know, students can use a jigsaw puzzle to successfully put the word (and its sounds) together in a highly interactive way. I think that this would be a great complementary chunking activity that could be facilitated in a lab, be center-based with one or two computers, and/or be used in front of the room with an interactive whiteboard. Jigsawplanet.com is free and, like the two sites explained above, it gives you many different ways to share your work like embedding, direct linking, social media, etc.
You can put this puzzle together by clicking on this link: http://www.jigsawplanet.com/?rc=play&pid=2bf7e7128977
3. Re-Reading In this case I’m not just talking about reading the text again for the sake of...well reading it again. This strategy requires that students have a few questions in mind before re-reading the text. Then, when they’re reading the text, their actually looking for answers to those questions. Implementing a Re-Reading Digital Activity •
Enter the reading passage that your students are going to re-read into a Discovery Education Writing Prompt and assign it to your students.
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As part of your Writing Prompt instructions, ask your students to record the questions that they are going to answer.
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Have them cut, paste and/or highlight the sentences that contain the answers that they are seeking.
Feeling Fancy? Embed a cool tool like an eReader/podcaster or another Web 2.0 site (see page two) into your prompt. Better yet ask your students to do the same in their responses!