The SurRural Librarian

This is a straight-up word processing lesson I thought up while walking the dog. It turned out really fun.

I noticed many kids didn’t know the difference between copying and cutting. I also noticed they needed practice pasting things in the right place (and only once), moving the cursor around and using keyboard shortcuts efficiently.

I made a web page filled with random words (I used a current classroom unit as the theme.) I made copies of the same page and handed them out to the students. They had to cut up the page - one word per piece of paper - and reorganize the words in any way they wanted onto a piece of colored paper. (Their teacher said it looked like a ransom note when they were done, and so was born a lesson name).

Then I told them to go to the web page, copy the words into a document and rearrange them by cutting and pasting, exactly replicating the version they created by hand. And they had to use keyboard shortcuts to do it.

(The kids love shortcuts and pick them up very quickly. Though many still use their mouse hand to type them, and I’m trying to get them more comfortable apple - xing with the left while mousing with the right. I’m forever going on about it, like it’s violin lessons.)

Having them cut the words out and glue them down again really helped them understand the difference between copying and cutting (and it gave us something to discuss as they cut up their strips of paper).

They thought it was a hoot, and some kids were very challenged by it, while others surprised at how good they were at it. A number of kids stayed in for the first few minutes of recess to finish (their idea, not mine) so I guess they didn’t hate it. All in all, pretty fun.