Information reports were our writing focus for Term 4. We read a lot of them, in School Journals, in books from the library, in magazines and on the Internet.
Kiwi*
First we wrote a group report about kiwi and published it here on our wiki – some people added more and edited it.
We used a writing framework with the following headings-
Title – the name of the bird
Classification – the type of bird
Description – what it has or looks like
Location – where it can be found/where it lives
Dynamics – what it does
Did You Know?/Interesting/I Wonder? (optional)
Each student then chose a New Zealand bird to research, some worked in pairs. We collected information using the framework. After proofreading the information was typed into a PowerPoint slideshow with one slide for each heading.
Then everyone drew an illustration and scanned it in. Some were scanned as they were. Some were cut out and scanned with a coloured paper background. Some were cut out and scanned with a photo background from old National Geographic magazines. A few had colours added or changed in Paint.net. Finally they were inserted into the slideshow.
The neat thing is, once you have the information you can do just about anything with it. A PowerPoint slideshow is easily saved as an rtf [save as>other formats>save as type>outline/rtf]. Delete the headings, add an illustration, reformat the text and you’re done. A word document is easily cut and pasted into a blog post or wiki page.
That’s what will be happening here over the next couple of weeks- a big bunch of bird blog posts.
Mr F
*kiwi image painted in Artrage 2.5, inking added in Paint.net
Filed under: Writing | Tagged: Animals, birds, glenview9, Writing | 2 Comments »
