exemplar activities

Unit 3 Activity 10 - Sentence building

OBJECTIVES

• To enable a pupil who can read well (50+ most frequently-used words) but who has no free-writing ability beyond forming his own christian name, to create correctly structured phrases and sentences independently about a given subject, including the appropriate use of full-stops.
• To develop skills at identifying words which begin with 'th' sounds (as stated in his current IEP).
• To understand that a right-hand arrow means to 'go to the next page' in computer terms.

SOFTWARE AND RESOURCES

• Clicker 4
• Sony Mavica camera used for recording images of tourist sites in Plymouth

PUPIL PROFILE

David is a fourteen year-old boy who experiences very specific physical limitations in that he is severely visually-impaired in his left eye, and also has no use whatsoever of his left arm and hand. Use of his right hand is also subject to great difficulties, particularly with regard to fine-motor control. However, he has learned how to position himself at a computer monitor so that he can focus on the screen in such a way that he can observe even the smallest of icons. Allied to this, he has worked extremely hard at developing his ability to manipulate the mouse very accurately indeed.

David's reading skills have continued to substantially improve over the past year; unfortunately, his writing skills have not matched this development-his pencil control remains weak, and is unlikely to extend beyond writing 'David' independently in the foreseeable future.

SCENARIO

This exercise was centred around this week's 'Literacy Hour', focused on the production of a tourist guide to Plymouth. This particular piece of work is aimed at achieving both word and sentence level objectives for David, as prescribed in his IEP.

The grid format chosen was based around a 'ready made' option, but with certain cells deleted in order to give the appropriate visual emphasis to four key areas:

1. 'th' words- these are grouped on the left-hand side of the grid
2. 'is' and 'are'- these two words are grouped on the right-hand side of the screen, and will enable David to complete a variety of sentence formats.
3. Nine digital photos which David had been involved with taking during a day out touring the main tourist attractions of Plymouth. The images were taken using a Sony Mavica camera, and saved onto floppy disk, rather than the hard drive.
4. A large 'next page' icon, which in the first grid encourages David to move on to the next linked grid.

Each of the cells has been visually enhanced for David by grouping them by background colour in order to encourage him to both focus on and sequence each stage of the sentence-structuring.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEVELOPING PUPIL'S SPECIFIC I.T. SKILLS

• Use of Mavica digital camera to record images
• Accurate use of the mouse and pointer
• Activation of speech function
• Deleting incorrectly placed words
• Turning to 'next page'
• Printing own work
• Saving own work

ACTIVITY

The two-page linked grid as prescribed above was presented to pupils as a group (including David) reading activity for a Literacy Hour session, relating to a recent class outing, and as laid down in the class's literacy planning document. David was then shown how to use the grids on a one-to-one basis with a member of staff. He consolidated recent work on reading 'th' words by reading the words on the grid, and shown how to move from the first grid onto the next one. After being shown twice, David then started work without aid, and went on construct good phrases, with each element in the correct order on both grids. At this stage, David could use 'th' words in repeated formats-this exercise was primarily about reading the target words, rather than being 'creative' with them.

When David was happy with his work, he was asked to print it out, which he did without any assistance, and further to this he practised saving his document into a named desktop file as part of his ICT IEP objective.

DEVELOPMENT

David quickly mastered the process of sentence construction using this grid format, understanding quickly how to work on the 4 main elements in the required order, and reading back the words-especially the target words- accurately and without prompting.

It was decided to make the task more demanding by asking David to use a different 'th' word for each picture. He again understood the task and reflected his understanding of grammatical sentence structure by achieving 3 out 4, and 4 out of 5 different configurations in grids one and two respectively. He also now knows that the smaller left and right arrows on the grid toolbar will also move him backwards and forwards through the linked grids, rather than necessarily using the larger arrows originally designed for his use.

NATURE OF EVIDENCE

• Digital images of the two linked 'David' grids.
• Copies of documents produced by David using the grids, annotated by staff
• Copy of report from the advisory teacher for the visually impaired after a recent visit, which comments categorically on David's independent use of Clicker 4

SUMMATIVE STATEMENT

This exercise has, without doubt, enabled David to create structured sentences using the four prescribed 'th' words, and it can be categorically stated that he can now differentiate between 'the', 'there', 'this' and 'these', in the given context, which was the main word-level objective of the task. He has displayed a good, developing knowledge of sentence structure, and includes a full-stop at the end of each one, especially as he knows it will enable Clicker to talk back to him-this contributing towards his sentence level targets. His reading back of his phrases has been fluent, and the use of the photos with such immediacy (ie within a day of taking them) has certainly added to his overall comprehension.

WHAT NEXT...

This work will be consolidated in the next stage by varying the context in which the target words for learning are used- primarily by using them with different sets of pictures.

Whilst David needs to work on similarly related structured 'Clicker Grids', I would like to see him moving towards a more independent approach to writing phrases. Whilst he needs the stimulation of pictures and photographs to motivate his creative thought processes, this needs to be coupled with tools to develop his free-writing skills-namely through the use of a personalised wordbank and spell-checker, as facilitated by Clicker. The 'talking book' Clicker grid format would appear to lend itself to this process, and we aim for David to produce such a book, using the same parameters as those listed above, but with the opportunity for greater 'free' input.

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