Organising Activities for Reading and Maths

If you have made some group specific activities in Kidspiration, Inspiration, PowerPoint, Keynote, Word or Pages, then you need to make them easily accessible. One method that used to work well for me and that I have introduced to many teachers is to make your group folders i.e. for Maths, they might be called, 'Squares, Hexagons, Triangles' and leave them on the desktop. Copy the files/activities for the week into the folder. Teach students how to find their folder and the activities. For Maths never put more than 5 activities into their folder. If there are fast finishers make a 'Fast Finisher' folder with activities they have completed in the past, sometimes I will choose ones like Time, Measurement and Geometry for maintenance practice.

You can also include Interactive Worksheets in Word, Pages, PowerPoint or Keynote with hyperlinks to the activities in that folder or to websites. This example to the right has been created in PowerPoint, and the screen captures are pictures of the actual online activity. These games are linked to the websites as a follow-up to what has been taught in Maths that week.

The following example has been created in Word. This is an interactive Reading worksheet with links to Inspiration activities and space to record their answers.
















And this is one of the examples of the Inspiration worksheets the above Word document links to.

If all of the related files are kept together in the same folder then you will not have any trouble accessing all of the files. But do remember one thing! When creating activities for students, save them as templates! If students have to save their work for it to be marked, teach them how to save to their own folder.
Interactive PowerPoints that hyperlink to games do not need to be saved by students. The only things that need to be saved is when changes have been made.

Before I send children off to complete activities, I always go over the activity I expect them to complete. Don't assume that they know how to do the activity i.e how to click on a hyperlink. Talk them through how they are going to do it and especially if they need to save a copy to their own folders.