Teaching with Writelike

Memory, Proofing, & Shuffle

You've seen the essential building blocks of Writelike lessons.

However there are some rare blocks that we should explain in case you ever happen to meet them (or if you want us to make more use of them somewhere).

Memory activity

In this activity, you retype a snippet from memory within a time limit. Click Start to begin typing, and finish within the limit or start again. (Hint: read and type in chunks.)

This is a good activity for younger students struggling with keyboarding skills, as well as basic reading and writing, but it's not core to what we do in Writelike so we don't use it much.

Write this snippet from memory

A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices, as the fishermen called to one another.

Frankenstein(1818)

Proofreading activity

In this activity type, you correct spelling and punctuation mistakes in a snippet.

We scramble spelling in a set number of words as well as punctuation symbols, and the student corrects each in turn. If you don't succeed within the time limit, you start again.

The original inspiration for this was trying to remind students to place commas inside quotation marks.

Proofread this snippet

"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.

"Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the duchess.

"They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.

Sir Thomas frowned. "I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country," he said to Lady Agatha.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

If you tried the proofing activity above, you'll have noticed that it is surprisingly challenging. (You had to know Humour is a name, the different capitalisation rules for the titles, etc.)

It's likely that you failed it first time through, but if you try it a second time you'll get it.

That's kind of the point: while not all proofing activities are that challenging, when they are, then the dynamic of "fail-once-try-again" aids both reinforcement and motivation.

Just an anecdotal observation, but we've been told that students who don't like writing do like doing the proofing activities.

They're gamelike: constrained, quick, and provide immediate success/failure feedback.

Shuffle activity

This activity will be familiar to most teachers: take a passage, jumble the sentences, and ask students to reassemble them in the correct order. The idea is to consider the cues and structures that create order and coherence throughout the passage.

Drag these sentences into the right order
0 checks used
  • The force of this water pushes the animal in the opposite direction.
  • Some animals, including squid, octopuses and jellyfish, move around by jet propulsion.
  • Squid and octopuses do this by taking in water and forcing it out of their body through a funnel-shaped tube called a hyponome.
The Usborne Science Encyclopedia(2009)

Note: As with textboxes, students have to complete these activities before they can click 'Next page'.

If they want to move on without succeeding on the activities, they can use the table of contents on the left, but the page will not be marked completed.

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