Spelling Practice

Spelling is an important literacy skill for all subjects at every year in school. PowerPoint presentation animations can be a useful tool for getting students to practice saying and spelling new words when they are starting a new topic. Here is an example of an automated spelling PowerPoint presentation I’m using with my Year 9 Science class.     List 1_Spelling_Practice_Sound
We have just started a unit on sound and light. This presentation contains our first ten spelling words and I like using this style of automated spelling presentation at the beginning of a lesson to help familiarise students with new terms and how to spell them.

If you like this presentation and would like to use your own word list you could download it and change the words the animation will still work. If you’re interested in how to create the animation this page is helpful.

Students as Text Analysts

Most educators today would agree that involving students in critical thinking is imperative to the learning process. So how can we make this a sustainable element of our pedagogy?

Santoro (2004) provides a useful example of how to provide scaffolding in order to allow students to take on the role of text analysts.

An example of engaging students as text analysts:

Students review a series of recent newspaper articles that focus on one aspect of the current unit of work and answer the following questions: