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Looking for ways to engage your students in online literacy learning? Find more interactive tools that help them accomplish a variety of goals-from organizing their thoughts to learning about language.
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Student Interactive
Cube Creator
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| Grades | 3 – 12 |
| Interactive Type | Organizing & Summarizing |
| Tech Requirement | |
| URL | http://www.readwritethink.org /files/resources/interactives /cube_creator/ |
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ABOUT THIS INTERACTIVE |
Summarizing information is an important postreading and prewriting activity that helps students synthesize what they have learned. The interactive Cube Creator offers four options:
Bio Cube: This option allows students to develop an outline of a person whose biography or autobiography they have just read; it can also be used before students write their own autobiography. Specific prompts ask students to describe a person's significance, background, and personality.
Mystery Cube: Use this option to help your students sort out the clues in their favorite mysteries or develop outlines for their own stories. Among its multiple applications, the Mystery Cube helps students identify mystery elements, practice using vocabulary from this popular genre, and sort and summarize information. Specific prompts ask students to describe the setting, clues, crime or mystery, victim, detective, and solution.
Story Cube: In this cube option, students can summarize the key elements in a story, including character, setting, conflict, resolution, and theme. Students can even identify their favorite part of the story. This can be used as an alternative to the Story Map interactive.
Create-Your-Own Cube: Working on a science unit? Doing some research on volcanoes? The Create-Your-Own Cube is your answer. This version allows teachers and students to generate their own questions or topics. Teachers can type in the questions, lock them from editing using the padlock icon, and save the file using the Save tab at the top of the screen. The saved file can then be shared with students to enter in their responses. Students can also customize cubes on topics of their choosing.
Students can save their draft cubes to revise later. See the five-minute video tutorial Saving Work With the Student Interactives for more information on have to save, e-mail, and open a file in any of the ReadWriteThink Student Interactives. The finished cube can also be saved, printed, and folded into a fun cube shape that can be used for future reference.
For ideas of how to use this tool outside the classroom, see Bio Cube and Mystery Cube in the Parent & Afterschool Resources section.
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Students move from modeled to independent comprehension of fiction stories by using texts by Jan Brett and interactive tools that demonstrate their comprehension.
Grades 2 – 5 | Lesson Plan | Minilesson
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Imagine if vocabulary could come alive with the click of a button! Students create video posters to demonstrate knowledge of new economics vocabulary.
Grades K – 12 | Student Interactive | Organizing & Summarizing
The Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.
Grades 3 – 8 | Calendar Activity | February 3
In 1927, Joan Lowery Nixon was born.
As a class, a genre study of mysteries takes place and a chart is made about what makes a good mystery.
Grades 3 – 8 | Calendar Activity | October 31
Students research information on Halloween, create masks or costumes from a text they are reading, or write a narrative essay describing their best Halloween ever.
Grades 3 – 8 | Professional Library | Book
Guided Comprehension in Grades 3-8
This book has everything you need to use the Guided Comprehension Model effectively with students in in upper elementary and middle school.
Grades 1 – 5 | Professional Library | Journal
eVoc Strategies: 10 Ways to Use Technology to Build Vocabulary
Drawing on research-based principles of vocabulary instruction and multimedia learning, this article presents 10 eVoc strategies that use free digital tools and Internet resources to evoke students' engaged vocabulary learning.
Grades 5 – 8 | Activity & Project
Have children explore the different parts of mystery writing by making a puzzle about a favorite book. They can then invent and write their own mysteries using the online Mystery Cube tool.
Grades 3 – 5 | Activity & Project
Telling My Story: Make a Bio-Cube
Let children explore an interesting subject—themselves. An online tool will teach them to summarize and organize information as they write.
Grades 3 – 12 | Game & Tool
The Bio Cube asks children to summarize information about a person for a biography or autobiography. The activity helps them learn how to identify and shorten key ideas.
Grades 3 – 8 | Game & Tool
The Mystery Cube asks children to separate a mystery into six distinct elements. Using it, children begin to see how a writer constructs a mystery—and can try writing their own.
