I was approached by Twinkl to have a look at the resources their site features. If you work in SEN you will become adept at adapting resources, very few off the shelf teaching resources will meet the needs of your learners.
One of the most interesting things I found on the Twinkl site was the “create” feature, this allows you to build a range of resources from displays to interactive games to worksheets. Now I’m not the biggest fan of a worksheet but with a bit of laminating they can easily turn into a folder task. I hate seeing folders of random sheets that all use different fonts imagery etc. If I am creating a pack for a topic it is much better that all the resources have a common look and feel. It just looks more cohesive and planned.
What I really like using with my class is the Interactive whiteboard. I usually use Smartnotebook to create interactive resources. Again using twinkl create allows me to create a cohesive resource set that links my own resources with the ones from the main site.
So I thought I would have a go at making an interactive lifeboat activity that linked in with our transport and community topics. Twinkl already had a lifeboat in their image collection so I don’t have to worry about licensing or trawling the web for a suitable picture.
The hot spot activity is a simple image overlay idea where the child touches the + sign to reveal more information about a feature. I used it to support a labeling task. For some of my class I had to use Communicate in print to add symbols to support their reading (even have to adapt our own resources)
Here is the video I made to explain the process.
The activity can be accessed here.
To make a wordmat to go with it presented me with a bit of an issue as I wanted to use areas of the image and the create tool doesn’t seem to allow this. an easy fix was just to screenshot the areas I wanted and upload them. You can then easily select the ones you want for any resource you create. Once created they are then all accessible via the site so no need to panic if you forget to save them or need another copy.
To facilitate this post I was given a free 6 month trial of Twinkle premium.
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