Independent Activities

This programme has been designed to give students in the senior school the tools they need to use proper grammar in their writing. The programme includes 5 sections (you can see these on the first slide), includes teaching tips on each skill, and activities for students to complete. Students could complete one slide/activity each week or fortnight as part of their independent literacy programmes.

*NB: The Grey Series is still being completed.

The activity can be printed out and completed by hand, or you can select the slide you need and make a copy to put on your class site.

This Handwriting Series has been designed to develop a few different skills; the ability to follow instructions accurately, penmanship, letter and shape formation.

It is an independent activity, so works well as a reading tumble activity. Students should expect to get feedback on their work, and can earn house points as a motivation tool.

*You will probably still have students (even in Y6) that require explicit teaching for letter formation.

The activity needs to be printed and trimmed to go into an exercise book, then (obviously!) completed by hand.

Inside these slides there is a range of activities that students can use as independent activities in their reading tumble.

The activities are designed in a generic way so that they are applicable to any text the students read (as long as the genre makes sense for that task).

The advantage of using a generic task is that the expectations will be familiar for the students the more they do them, only the content will be changing. It also means you won't have to create new activities for every text your groups read.

If your students begin to tire of a particular task or their standards/motivation slips then move onto a different type of activity.

The "Under the Microscope" activity is about extending learners and giving them opportunities to delve into topics of interest. It follows the Learn, Create, Share mentality of the Manaiakalani programme, so is very suitable for our learners.

Students can follow the process independently (although some learners may need extra guidance) and can complete a range of activities using a single text.

Many of the suggested activities include creating resources for their classmates to complete, so the "share" component is very strong.

Students can also invent their own activities or ways of presenting ideas.