Lost in the Jungle to Space Race: offline analog reader to online digital player

The raw material

As a pre-read/speed read I asked my class to find all the animals they could in the story. I think 'sloth' is a low-frequency noun (it's not in the text!) and a bonus point to the lad who asked me what a "lazy whatsit (in Japanese)" is in English! Looking hard for creepy crawlies too!

Previous titles in the orange series have introduced irregular past tense verbs, and most of those occuring in this story are not new. We listened to the narration on the CD, underlining said, got, threw etc as we followed the text. I coughed and/or paused the CD if we missed one - lots of peeking at friends' books.

Vocab/grammar in logical place

This gives the children something to 'do' - and a not easy task either. Competitive challenge too, as well as co-operative; writing them as a list in the inside back cover & counting - in this case we had collected 22. I wouldn't ordinarilly go anywhere near that many in the course of a class!

A messy board - brainstorming

The challenge then was to try to remember what the original form of the verbs looked like. They could remember a few but 22 is a daunting; nice teacher put them up on the board but oops in a bit of a mess. We took turns to call out pairs and scribble them down in our books (see right). I think you'll agree these ARE high frequency words, so making a decent note of them is no bad thing and in a place where we can remember them ie in the Jungle!

The digital version of my messy board is a lot more fun with a PC: check out  Space Race below. Plenty of other fun ways to use Quizlet online; apps work oniOS as well but with limited functionality (still useful!).

 Why not log in to Quizlet & see if you can set a high score?!