Textivate.com offers a great teacher tool for creating simple interactive tasks for younger students.
Update: Later discovered that all quizzes can be embedded on your class website or blog. Great feature!
For my set of interactive tasks I chose a poem by Kenn Nesbitt Today I Had a Rotten Day. It is a brilliant poem for teaching the students about the body parts, and a wonderful resource for teaching the verbs.
Today I had a rotten day
as I was coming in from play.
I accidentally stubbed my toes
and tripped and fell and whacked my nose.
I chipped a tooth. I cut my lip.
I scraped my knee. I hurt my hip.
I pulled my shoulder, tweaked my ear,
and got a bruise upon my rear.
I banged my elbow, barked my shin.
A welt is forming on my chin.
My pencil poked me in the thigh.
I got an eyelash in my eye.
I sprained my back. I wrenched my neck.
I’m feeling like a total wreck.
So that’s the last time I refuse
when teacher says to tie my shoes.
To create the tasks, you can choose from various options.
I started with the easiest task, in my opinion - separating the words. After your students have read the poem, they go online to the address you have given them and separate the words of the poem. To do it, they just have to click in the right place.
After the first task, they go on to the next, slightly more difficult task - mixed lines. There are many layout variants, I used 10 tiles. Students rearrange the lines by dragging the tiles.
When they have done the easier tasks, they go to the next task which is a little more challenging than the previous ones - they have to write the missing vowels.
After the vowel task, give them a considerably more difficult task - putting back the missing consonants.
Now it's time to ask your students to recall and write the missing words. The good thing is that the tool generates a new variant each time you click on Restart. The words may be hidden or shown depending on your student abilities. If they see the words, they simply drag them to the right space.
Finally, ask your students to reconstruct the poem from scratch - with only empty letter squares given. Looks hard but in fact it isn't, taking into account they will have learned the poem by that time.
Observe how proud they will look after they have completed the last version of the tasks!
