Adult Basic Skills Professional Development Project
May 2001
Focus on Reading
Jeff Goodman
Creating Web Pages to Build a Reading and Writing Community
Modern Fashion and Invention
In this activity, students work in groups to create newspaper articles
about silly fashions or inventions and post these to the web, complete
with digital images to support their stories. These stories are then
used as group reading texts.
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The activity begins with groups choosing from a set of unusual objects
and giving the object of their choice to another group.
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Next, each group must work with the object they have been given to create
a newspaper article describing the object.
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Each group creates a digital image of the object in use (preferably with
one or more of them using it), pastes both the object description and the
image into a web page, and publishes this page for others to view and use
as reading texts. (This may also be done with simple word-processing
software, though the community building aspects of the activity are accentuated
if students can post their finished work to the web.)
Detailed Example: The
Harinet of Steel
Other
Examples from student work
Story Pictures
The Story Pictures activity is sequencing and writing activity that
allows students to create their own texts to use in reading practice. In
this activity, students:
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Sequence a set of pictures and write a story based on these images.
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Publish the stories in the form of a web page.
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View the work of other members of the class and compare and contrast the
choices different groups made.
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Create sets of images for others to sequence and post these to the web.
Images to be sequenced:
Tools
The following will be useful for us as we do this work:
