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 next get a chance to use errorless and guided writing activities to expand their skills in writing about trucks. These let them use a much wider selection of descriptive words to practice making sentences. In the highest level writing activity, My Cool Trucks, students custom-paint their own cool truck images and write about them. The photos from Ten Trucks, and lots more truck photos, can be downloaded for future trucking fun.
Beginning Reading and Writing
Both the Classroom Suite® and Clicker 5® versions include the Ten Trucks anchor book, supported writing, and My Cool Trucks coloring/writing activity. There are two simple writing choices, one with forced word order and the other with words grouped by color code to make it easy to form sentences. In My Cool Trucks, students write free-form after coloring the image.
The four Classroom Suite activities all install from a single zip file. There are custom overlays for the Classroom Suite activity set, and Dynavox® package versions of those overlays. See the Special Needs Access section on the System Reqs page for information on controlling the Classroom Suite version from PRC devices.
The four Clicker 5 activities install as an integrated study unit. For details on integrated study units, click here. There is a Cloze Pro® activity to complement the Clicker 5 version. There also are PowerPoint®, My Own Bookshelf®, and printable PDF versions of Ten Trucks, and a Microsoft Word® version of the coloring/writing activity, My Cool Trucks.
Color It and Write About It
In the coloring/writing activity, each page has a truck outline with various custom paint styles outlined upon them. In the Classroom Suite version, students start in Paint mode and switch to writing mode with a single button on each page. Clicker Paint® would be handy for the Clicker 5 painting activity. But since files with the truck outlines can be downloaded separately, students potentially could color them in another application and then load in their completed drawings to use My Cool Trucks in Clicker 5. The truck outlines, plus a blank truck, are in the Trucks To Color zip file.
The Microsoft Word® version of My Cool Trucks could be printed and colored off computer, or students could use the Trucks To Color files in any paint application.
While My Cool Trucks initially has just three pages, each with a unique design on a truck, you could duplicate the pages to have students try out the same designs with different colors, and have more to write about. I’ve included a blank truck outline to load into a duplicated page, in case there are students with creative custom paint scheme ideas of their own.
Don’t Forget The Art!
There are also photos and clip art to download. The photo file has a wide array of truck photos, far beyond the ten in the Ten Trucks book. One of the pages in the book shows a tiny toy truck in someone’s hand. I created that in Bryce 3D®, and realized it would be easy to do a whole fleet of toy trucks! So there also is a clip art file of toy trucks in multiple colors to use in new activities.
Application needed: IntelliTools Classroom Suite, Clicker 5, Clicker Paint, My Own Bookshelf, PowerPoint, Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Word
Subject area: Reading, Writing.
Level: Grades Pre-K-1.
Downloads-Activities
Printable Activities
TenTrucks.pdf (5.1 MB) Ten Trucks book to print. Acrobat Reader.
My Cool Trucks.doc (1.0 MB) My Cool Trucks book to print. Microsoft Word.
Clicker 5
TrucksClick.zip (8.1 MB) Trucks integrated activity unit in Clicker 5. Includes Ten Trucks anchor book, Trucks Easy Writer forced word order activity, Writing About Trucks supported writing, and My Cool Trucks coloring and writing activity, all linked to a menu grid.
TrucksCloze.clz (5.3 MB) Tests comprehension by using the text from Ten Trucks in a Cloze Pro activity.
Classroom Suite
TrucksSuite.zip (15.6 MB) Trucks activity set in Classroom Suite v.3 or later. Includes Includes Ten Trucks anchor book, Trucks Easy Writing errorless writing activity, Writing About Trucks supported writing, and My Cool Trucks coloring and writing activity. Custom IntelliKeys overlays are attached.
DynavoxTrucks.zip (171.2 KB) Four trucks activities overlays saved as Dynavox package files. You must decompress to use the four files
PowerPoint
Ten Trucks.ppt.zip (6.7 MB) Ten Trucks book saved as a .ppt file. You must unzip the file to use it. PowerPoint 2003 or later.
SoftTouch
TenTrucksSoft.zip (6.1 MB) Folder with Ten Trucks book to import into My Own Bookshelf.
Downloads-Resources
TrucksPhotos.zip (5.5 MB) Photos of all the trucks from Ten Trucks and many, many more. To preview the collection, click here.
ToyTrucksClip.zip (413 KB) Toy trucks in multiple colors clip art. To preview the collection, click here.
TrucksToColor.zip (418 KB) Line drawings of the trucks used in My Cool Trucks plus one undecorated truck line drawing. To preview the collection, click here.
WOW! I can not wait to load this activity on to my 2nd graders laptop. He is a 2 switch step scanner and the coloring pages will be great for him. To combine the book, writing and art together will mean he can be engaged in reading, writing and switch scanning fun!!
January 22, 2009 @ 10:52 pmthanks…..
I’m glad you found Trucks useful, Teresa! Boys always have a lot to say about trucks, so it seemed a perfect fit for a writing opportunity. Having kids create their own version of something by coloring, and then write about it, has great potential.
January 25, 2009 @ 6:53 pm