This article is not for those teachers who have embraced technology in the classroom with open arms. Rather it is for those who are making first steps in this direction, from one who is doing the same.

Making books and keeping journals are not new learning activities, of course. What is new for me, however, is being able to do this with primary children, using the word processor. Encouraged by their beautiful work and by the confidence that the pupils are gaining, I would like to share these two twists to the tale with others who might be reluctant to have a go.

Making books

As an ongoing project to exploit stories they have been told in class, primary children can make their own books. How much of the process you can ask them to do depends on the time you have, the number of computers available and, of course, their individual language skills.

Basically, to make a book, the children need a set of pictures, and some speech or thought balloons. Adding captions, however, gives more language mileage.

The I-Spy series of books (Ashworth, J., Clark, J. and Lawday, C. published by OUP) is a very good starting point for such a project as, in the photocopiable materials provided, there is a set of line drawings for the stories, which are ideal as the children can colour them according to their own taste. The teacher, of course, could also produce simple illustrations herself for the purpose. In either case, a copy for each child is needed, as, even if they work in groups at the computer, they usually want their own copy of the finished opus.

The teacher also needs to prepare a set of speech or thought balloons, usually one for every picture in the story. This includes the text inside the balloons. Finally a set of captions is prepared, again, one for each picture. These are based on the tape-script or story text. However, the words in each individual sentence are muddled up so that the children have to put them into the correct order.

After the first or second reading of the story, the children order and number the prepared pictures and stick them on A-4 pages leaving room for the prepared captions and balloons. Next they match the prepared balloons to each picture and stick them on the pictures. This can be done before turning to
the computer.

The muddled sentences, which are to become the captions under the pictures, should be written on the board, or OHT. In this way, one or two can be done with the whole class, before allowing the children to work at the word processor independently. It may be more convenient for the pupils, at this point, to have this work on handouts.

Bearing in mind that the children in our classes have different abilities, the task can be made easier by signalling the first word of each sentence. As stories are often chosen because they have a lot of repetition, once the children have written a few sentences, the more confident ones can try and work out new sentences for themselves and early finishers can be encouraged to embellish the basic text with sentences of their own devising.

When the children have finished writing the captions, their texts are printed out. They then cut out the individual captions and stick them beneath the corresponding picture.

Clearly, there are other variations of this process. After the first or second reading, the pupils could each prepare their own pictures, and the balloons with the texts inside them. Also, children or groups of children could work on part of the story only and then co-operatively produce the books. This would take less time than the individual preparation, which can be quite time-consuming. Group work can also be for a wall display, each pupil or group being responsible for one or more pictures.

During this work, the children's confidence in themselves both as language learners and computer users grows visibly as the project progresses (and the teacher's confidence in them to do this work both independently and co-operatively also increases!). The pupils pay close attention to language form but are supported in their understanding by the conventions of story telling and by the nature of the exercises in which they need to order and copy text and match it to the pictures which they are familiar with. There is much recycling of lexis and scope for individual variations and choice and re-writing is done painlessly. Disadvantages of course exist! Computers can crash and young learners take time but I believe the end really does justify the means.

Journals

An idea, which takes far less time both to prepare and carry out, is to use the word processor for journal writing. At the beginning of the session, the teacher writes a question on the board, which pupils type on the computer. They then write their answers, with one or two sentences, and insert appropriate art-work using Clip Art or similar. Questions can be repeated or slightly modified from one lesson to the next, and because they save what they write at the end of each word processing session, the children can refer back to their own work for structures, vocabulary and spellings. They ask how to say and write expressions, which are written on the board for others to notice and use.

Each time this is done, the class's work can be collated and displayed. At intervals, further work, such as a reading comprehension exercise can be based on this display.

Many of the children have had at least some experience with computers while others are confident users. These latter can be used to tell others how to do things, often relaying to their colleagues a string of commands from the menus (which in my circumstances appear on the screen in English) to do so. The children, therefore, not only get individualised, but quite controlled, practice in using the language, but also, at the same time, expand their knowledge of word processing both in terms of skills and terminology.
The questions are sometimes ones with which they are familiar; others demand the use of known vocabulary although the structure they need is given as a formula. Example questions for primary English pupils in their third year of English are:

What are your favourite….. ? (Different items depending on topics known)
What are you going to do this weekend? / Are you going to do anything special this weekend? /tonight? What do you like doing in your spare time?
Tell me about yourself ./ your brother or sister / your pet
Let's talk about parties.

Again, this work takes time and the teacher is kept busy responding to individual requests for language and technical help. However, after observing how willing the children are to help each other and how they respond to the praise for doing this, how some reveal new strengths as well as how involved they are in producing these short texts, I believe it is a clearly worthwhile classroom activity.