There are tons of Kidspiration examples available for download on the internet. I came across and ELA lesson I really love and it is available directly from the Kidspiration website. The lesson is called, “Opening Hooks” and the site says it is geared for Grades K-5 (it would definitely need to be modified from its original content to be used across all of these grade levels.) The lesson can be found at http://www.inspiration.com/LessonPlan/OpeningHooks. The site organized ideas for lessons into content area categories. As a Literacy Specialist student, I was curious to look mostly at lessons designed to work with students for ELA lessons. In my classroom, we have Reading and Writing Workshop daily, and I wanted to see if these model lessons would give me any ideas of how to incorporate this kind of technology into the workshop model. “Opening Hooks” immediately caught my attention because this is actually one of the 3rd grade teaching points. When the students are in the process of revising the drafts, one of the teaching points is, “Writers revise their drafts to make their stories sound better. One way writers can do this is by re-writing the first sentence to their story and choosing the best one.” Students are not always so excited to have to re-write the first sentence of their draft again, especially if they already like the one that they have! Therefore, I thought this lesson plan and the use of Kidspiration would really make this mini-lesson in Writing Workshop a lot more fun and valuable for my students. Here are two images of what the sample looks like:
I downloaded the 30-day free trial of Kidspiration and had some fun playing around with all of the tools! The first idea I wanted to try out using this program was something to support the Fantasy and Reality PowerPoint I created. I thought this would be useful for students who needed a bit more support and practice with identifying the difference between fantasy and reality. I really liked the idea of doing this on the computer to carry along with the PowerPoint. I could have easily created a worksheet where students cut out pictures and glue them in the appropriate places or even draw lines, but I thought this would be more fun and engaging. I didn’t want the students who need extra support with this concept to feel upset or annoyed that they had to do more work on the same topic and I thought working on Kidspiration would be the perfect way to avoid this from happening. As a result, I created the following activity for my students:
I also wanted to try out the web making feature on the program. My purpose in taking the technology class was to give me tools that I could use as a literacy specialist to adapt reading and writing for my students with special needs. Therefore, I immediately thought about ways that Kidspiration would be useful in Reading and Writing Workshop. One thing that I have noticed lately with all of my students is that they are having a difficult time coming up with ideas for stories. I planned to do a mini-lesson with the students about this issue. The teaching point I came up with was, “Writers get ideas for stories by thinking about people, places, and things that are important to them.” When I presented this mini-lesson, many of my students were really excited for independent writing and they couldn’t wait to write new stories with all of their ideas. However, for some of the students, I don’t think that my teaching point was explicit enough. I thought about ways that I could present this in another way to give my struggling writers a sense of independence. Kidspiration got me thinking about how I could present this in a web format and give students a visual representation of what they could do to help come up with ideas for stories. I created these webs as a model for students and I think they will be very helpful in terms of generating ideas. Likewise, I think it would be beneficial for my students to try this out on Kidspiration for themselves as well!
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