Classic activities in Classroom Suite have a button with a speech balloon. Clicking this button gives the student audible instructions or directions about the assignment. It would be even better to have the instructions visible as well as audible. Here’s how! Bonus: PDF you can use as a handout for presentations.

Ten Trucks uses photos and a “red fish, blue fish” style vocabulary to engage beginning readers and help them work with adjectives. There are all kinds of truck photos, ending with a very cool custom painted truck. Students use errorless and guided writing activities to work with adjectives. In the highest level writing activity, My Cool Trucks, students custom-paint their own cool truck images and write about them. Bonus: Lots of truck photos and clip art to download!

The Let’s Make A Wreath book gives students a chance to choose decorations for a wreath, then see what the completed wreath looks like lighted and hanging up. I went crazy on this one, with three choices of bow (gold, white, red), three choices of plant trimmings (pine cones, holly, poinsettias), and three novelty decorations to choose from (candy canes, gold stars, snowflakes). If you remember your math, that’s 27 possible wreaths! Bonus: ALL the art for download!

Text-To-Speech is a powerful computer option, particularly valuable for struggling readers and students with visual issues. Once and while though, you’ll hear a word pronounced incorrectly, most often if it’s a proper name or a technical term. You can correct the pronunciation of a word in Clicker 5®, IntelliTools Classroom Suite®, and My Own Bookshelf®. Detailed instructions and screenshots for all three!

I made several off line activities to go with Showertime! They include simple picture and word lotto, picture-to-word match, trace the word, and riddle clues to use with lotto or other activities. They are made with Boardmaker® using your pictures. –Alison Wade PDF version here to download!

The Inventions activity set uses the story of the invention of Velcro® by George de Mestral to explore the process of invention and what it takes to be a successful inventor. The anchor book, How Things Get Invented, is available at two reading levels, grades 2-3 and grades 4-5. There are also comprehension tests and a Cloze Pro® activity. The final piece of the Inventions activity set are writing activities in both Classroom Suite and Clicker 5 format, entitled Could I Be An Inventor? Bonus: Vocabulary list with definitions!

If you have several related grid sets, it makes sense to link them as an integrated study unit. This can be moved as a unit, so it is easy to share. It can be copied into the Clicker 5 shared files folder, so that it appears in Clicker Explorer. It can have a menu grid with links to all the activities of the unit, and instructions telling the student which to open first. Detailed instructional PDF. Bonus: Menu grid template!

When I did the Halloween activities, I needed a sound clip for the finale with several people talking at once. Since there was only me to do it, this could have been a problem. But luckily I had Audacity, a powerful, and better yet, free sound editing program, to help me out. I was able to generate what sounds like four different people talking together, their voices overlapping but not precisely. Download PDF with detailed instructions!

In The Animals Game, a fun science activity, students pick an animal and make the computer guess its name. It’s really a test of the student’s grasp of animal characteristics, but with a twist so that the student runs the show. Students answer questions yes or no, and the computer quickly closes in on the answer. Bonus: Clip art collection and flow chart.

Mountain Bike Race takes the reader to the top of a mountain and down the trails to the bottom on a mountain bike. The reading level is 3rd to 4th grade, but the story would interest older students as well. The reader sees the scenery from a bike rider’s viewpoint, and movies of the bike coming up the lift, the racers starting down, and the end of the race make this a vivid and real experience. Bonus: Collection of photos from the story, plus extra mountain scenes!