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Word Processing

The skills of handwriting and keyboarding are two methods of producing print on a page, both of which have purpose and value. Computers are a valuable educational tool for students to improve their literacy skills.

For writing with the computer to be efficient and effective, it makes sense that children do better by mastering some basic word processing skills and by using efficient keyboarding technique rather than "hunt and peck" typing using only their index fingers. Competent word processing and keyboarding skills empower students with the skills to effectively and efficiently produce documents of meaningful text for reading, sharing and reflective thinking.

The silly rhyme, “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” is a wonderful tool for teaching word processing. The repetition and sequencing offer excellent language opportunities that delight children while they work.

Keyboard Skills

When typing in this activity, students can focus on keyboarding technique due to the simplicity of the text. In addition, only the beginning of each stanza is typed, because the repetition in the work is a great vehicle for copy and paste skill building.

Copy and Paste

Using copy and paste is one of the greatest time-savers in computing. Understanding when and how to use this skill is of equal importance to mastering the actual process. This work contains lots of copy and paste practice opportunities.

Thesaurus and Find & Replace

To extend this work, students use selected vocabulary in the poem with Word’s Thesaurus function to create a table of synonyms in a separate document. Students used the Find & Replace command to replace chosen words with their choice of synonym - making the poem even sillier than ever!

Educational Outcomes

In this Computer Room activity, year 4 students used many word processing and literacy skills to produce their own version of a very silly rhyme.

Computer technology skills covered:

• Typing and word processing skills using Microsoft Word

• Formatting using font, size, style and alignment

• File management, saving and retrieving a document

• Using the spell checker and thesaurus

• Understand and using cut, copy, paste

• Inserting, resizing and formatting clip art

• Managing multitasking using the Taskbar

• Adding a table to a document and working in rows and columns

• Publishing, editing and printing

Curriculum areas include:

English

• RS2.8 Discusses the text structure of a range of text types and the grammatical features that are characteristic of those text types.

• WS2.9 Drafts, revises, proofreads and publishes well-structured texts that are more demanding in terms of topic, audience and written language features.

• WS2.10 Produces texts clearly, effectively and accurately, using the sentence structure, grammatical features and punctuation conventions of the text type.

• WS2.12 Uses joined letters when writing in NSW Foundation Style and demonstrates basic desktop publishing skills on the computer.

• WS2.14 Discusses how own texts have been structured to achieve their purpose and the grammatical features characteristic of the various text types used.

Science and Technology

• UTS2.9 Selects and uses a range of equipment, computer-based technology, materials and other resources with developing skill to enhance investigation and design tasks.

Reference:

http://www.psd267.wednet.edu/~kfranz/Literacy/primarykeyboarding.htm#KEYBOARDING%20LESSONS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Lady_Who_Swallowed_a_Fly

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/stories/rhyme/ladyfly/
http://www.marcias-lesson-links.com/OldLady.html

   Cheryl Hill © 2007