Ready Made Curriculum Activities: Lewis and Clark

"IntelliTools makes History come alive in this fun, interactive unit study!" -- The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine

Follow Lewis and Clark on their journey out west with this CD-ROM and Teacher's Guide. ReadyMade Lewis and Clark is organized into eight topic areas: Expedition History, Prepare the Expedition, Starting West, Fort Mandan, Uncharted Lands, Crossing Mountains, Reaching the Pacific, and Returning Home. Topics are arranged chronologically, and each topic includes three (or more) activities. Each activity goes into (chronologically) the people, places, and events of that period. The activities give you a real feel for the historical events of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and cover a wide range of subjects. This study covers social studies, history, and language arts, and even making charts and time lines. It also includes viewing and creating maps, keeping journals, writing and illustrating newspaper accounts, letters and poetry, decision making and problem solving skills, vocabulary, and math story problems based on data of the expedition. It is geared towards grades three to five, but can be used with younger or older children. Excellent for special needs kids and adults. Our six-year-old absolutely loves the letter writing activities!

I think one of the things I love about this program is that it is simple to implement and even simpler to track your children's progress, but most of all, and, SHHHHHHH, don't tell anyone, but it is as much fun for the adults as it is for the children! You can print out their work, or save it in the child's "portfolio." You can use this program as a complete unit study (as it can be as detailed as you like - you can even change voice and pronunciation with this awesome program). It also gives a great list of Extension Activities to broaden your study further, or you could use as an extra fun activity in their study of history. The photos, graphics, and overall content of this program is truly great -and most of all FUN for the whole family!

-- Product Review by: Lisa Barthuly, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine

Intellikeys, IntelliPics Studio, and Overlay Maker

"This is not just a dressed up computer game; it is a sophisticated program." -- The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine

What's a parent to do if their child with special needs is not able to use a keyboard or mouse, but would benefit from being able to use a computer? What about a parent with kids who don't have special needs, but want a program to easily create multimedia presentations to enrich their learning? A well trusted company, Intellitools (www.intellitools.com), might be able to help. Intellitools started 20 years ago when the founder, Steve Gensler, was studying mechanical and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. A fellow student with cerebral palsy and other physical difficulties used a laptop computer to take notes, but had great difficulty keeping up with the lectures. Mr. Gensler created the first version of Intellikeys, a very unique and customizable keyboard to meet this need. The company continues to make this outstanding hardware, but has also expanded into software for children and adults, that works especially well for kids with special physical and cognitive needs, but has something to offer any kids who learn well on a computer. They are the winners of several prestigious awards, including the 1996 and 2002 Tibbetts Award from the Small Business Administration's Small Business Innovation Research program, and numerous Technology and Learning Awards. The company consists of 65 employees who have a passion for improving the lives of children, including many who have a child with special needs. The company is very friendly to homeschoolers and understands the unique challenges we have to educate our children without the budgets and resources of public schools.

First, let me give you a quick tour of the three products and how they work together. Intellikeys USB is a creative keyboard that allows you to customize the "buttons" or keys any way you like to meet the needs of your child. Overlays fit over the touch sensitive keyboard. The overlays can be customized for each program and the computer reads the keys just like a regular keyboard. The Intellikeys fits a standard USB port and can be adapted to work with a Macintosh computer. The standard keyboard and mouse remain active, making it easy to maneuver through programs. The Intellikeys keyboard, and all of the Intellitools software, also allow the use of switches (buttons that a child can press with a knee, their elbows, etc.), head wands, or a touch screen. Intellikeys comes with six alternate keyboard overlays, ranging from simple mouse access and math overlays to complex word processing types of commands and an Internet access overlay. This hardware can open up a whole new world for kids who would benefit from computer programs, but cannot manipulate a traditional keyboard or mouse. My 3-year-old son, Benjamin, who has Down Syndrome and difficulties with fine motor skills, was able to easily use the Intellikeys keyboard. He can make the computer interact with him without having to try to tell me through sign language what he wants to do. The Intellikeys keyboard is a handy tool for kids with and without special needs, but is not required to run any of the Intellitools programs.

Overlay Maker is a user-friendly program that allows you to easily make overlays to match specific programs. If you want to use Intellikeys, but want to customize the overlay for your child, Overlay Maker allows you to rearrange keys, change the keys, change the pictures, add or delete keys, or start from scratch to make whatever you need. The program also gives the computer directions, so every time you use that overlay, the computer correctly reads the keys. The overlays are very easy to create and even easier to use. They can be very simple with just a few keys on the overlay, or very complex with many keys and many functions.

IntelliPics Studio is the fun and educational part of this trio. It is sort of an educational version of Power Point, allowing parents and kids to make multimedia games, reports, activities, quizzes, and slide shows. Several templates and tutorials give you a feel for what the program can do - everything from a simple coloring book to a complicated report on Mars, complete with sound, pictures, video, and Internet links. I was easily able to adapt some of the templates to present and practice concepts my kids are learning. They were both enthralled with the programs. My eight-year-old son, Josiah, without any instruction on the program, was able to design several of his own projects, including a book with live audio dialog to illustrate a concept for our unit study, a coloring book for his brother, and a detailed quiz about dinosaurs (that I promptly flunked)! He used a standard keyboard and mouse for designing and using his program, although other means such as an Intellikeys keyboard, switches, or touch screens could also have been used. This is not just a dressed up computer game; it is a sophisticated program that allows you to create interactive multimedia presentations designed to coincide with what your children are learning. To get a feel for what IntelliPics Studio can do, you can download a free player and hundreds of sample templates from the website (www.intellitools.com). The player will not print or edit the templates, but will give you a very good taste of what they can do!

Perhaps the best part of these products is how easily and effectively they work together. For example, if your daughter with physical difficulties is learning colors, you could make an overlay (with Overlay Maker) that shows three big circles filled with three different colors, which are the keys. Later you could make another overlay with five or six colors, and another with 10 or 12 colors as she learns more and more colors. Using IntelliPics Studio you can easily create a program that asks her to choose the correct color, or lets her use the Intellikeys keyboard to color pictures and names the colors she selects, etc. She would only have to touch lightly on one of the large picture keys to send the correct signal to the computer. The keys can be customized to meet your child's needs, large or small, few or many, with pictures, words, or both to identify the keys, etc. One template, called Early Concepts, allows the child to select an animal from one group of keys, choose the number of animals from another, the size and color of the animals from another group, a motion for the animals such as falling or going left, and a background. As she chooses and changes the options, the computer reads aloud what she has selected, such as "three large brown bears bouncing" while the screen shows the bears bouncing along the screen.

I have to add a quick word about Intellitools' Balanced Literacy program, which was reviewed by Christine Field, Senior Correspondent for TOS. This outstanding reading program could be used alone very effectively for children without special needs, with learning disabilities, or with some cognitive delays. However, if your child has some physical difficulties, the combination of Balanced Literacy and Intellikeys could provide a wonderful reading program that they can use easily on the computer. Balanced Literacy has Intellikeys overlays that easily take the child through the various screens and activities without having to use a traditional keyboard or a mouse. For example, on the first lesson the overlay shows the same scene as the program and allows the child to touch the picture of the animal on the Intellikeys keyboard, which looks just like the screen, making it easy for even young children to use. Each new screen shows a prompt for which overlay to use for that part of the program.

There are only a few downsides to these products. First, I had a few minor technical difficulties, like having to reinstall Intellikeys if I unplugged the USB and then replugged it. Second, while most commands are very user-friendly and logical, some of the more advanced features can be a bit cumbersome until you get the hang of the products. The company tried to give a very broad range of levels, from young children with simple and user-friendly programs, to older children with much more complicated and powerful options. If you have a working knowledge of computers, you shouldn't have any serious difficulties, but if the thought of turning on a computer sends you shrieking into the night, this might not be right for you! And, finally, the products are a bit expensive, as are most products for kids with special needs. You can purchase these products straight from the company or other suppliers online. The retail prices are $395 for Intellikeys, $139.95 for IntelliPics Studio, and $99.95 for Overlay Maker. The prices are comparable with other similar products, although I think the quality and versatility of Intellitools is much better than the competitors I've seen.

Overall, these three products, Intellikeys, IntelliPics Studio, and Overlay Maker are excellent products that are far and away better than competing products. I think for most families of children with special needs, these products could be very helpful for several reasons: they can be easily adapted to the specific needs of your child and the way he or she learns best; they are mostly very user-friendly; they can be used by one child at a time, or used with groups of kids studying the same topic; they work very well together and with other programs; the company is eager to help homeschoolers provide a wonderful education for their children; all of the products come with very good manuals and tutorials and are made of high quality materials; and these three products together, or IntelliPics Studio alone, could easily be used to make very creative multimedia activities on any subject for children with or without special needs. And did I mention that the company offers classes around the country to help teachers (that includes us) utilize their products most effectively, and that there are hundreds of templates submitted by teachers and parents that you can download for free from the Intellitools website, covering every imaginable subject? With IntelliPics Studio these templates can be used as is or can be adapted to the particular needs of your children, whether they have special needs or not. I can't wait to try the U.S. States template, and the Mars template, and the Alphabet template, etc. Did I also mention that Intellitools is offering a 10 percent discount to TOS readers?

-- Product Review by: Dr. Anne Margaret Wright, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine

Balanced Literacy

I am the parent of a struggling reader. As such, I have researched the process of reading extensively and have had a chance to look at a variety of programs to help struggling readers. Although The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine does not give star ratings for products, Balanced Literacy hits a home run!

The debate between phonics and sight word reading continues. Many reading programs land on one end of the spectrum or another. Balanced Literacy is well named because is contains aspects of both approaches, leaving the teacher the freedom to focus on each student's needs. A tremendous amount of research went into this package. It was developed with a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. It meets state standards and was researched and evaluated by teachers nationwide. Why is this significant? I may have a theory about some aspect of learning and use it successfully with my child, but this is not an indicator that this approach will work with any other child. Balanced Literacy has been tried and tested with all kinds of learners and all kinds of teachers. It can be used by beginning readers, as well as by students with physical or cognitive disabilities. The traditional keyboard and mouse can be used, or an alternative keyboard is available for children unable to use a standard keyboard. There is even a feature to control the size of the text!

The materials consist of a CD, a teacher's manual with day-by-day lesson plans and reproducibles, and a set of anchor books - hard copies of the stories on the CD. The theory is that the children first learn Onsets, which are consonants and consonant clusters found at the beginning of single syllable words, before the first vowel. They then progress to learning Rimes - clusters of letters that begin with the first vowel and continue to the end of the word in single syllable words - or phonograms, word families, or chunks.

The program consists of guided reading of the anchor books, word study activities, both on the computer as well as with black line masters included in the teacher's manual, structured writing activities in each unit, and self-selected reading. There are nine units each based on an animal theme. Each unit consists of 16 lessons and thus covers first grade reading skills. A record keeping aspect allows the teacher to track and document each child's progress.

Let's walk through a lesson. Each unit begins with the anchor book. The student can listen to the story being read with the words highlighted. Pages may be repeated. Or the student may read the book themselves with the audio portion turned off. Next the student is given the opportunity to explore the story and test their understanding by answering questions and getting immediate feedback. The student can then quit, or choose to move on to learn the onset song and related activities. The student is given a screen of 12 pictures and is asked to select the picture that begins with the onset sound. Next comes a rime activity - a song introduces the rime and an activity and review are presented. The remainder of the unit includes a pattern book, which gives the child practice in specific language patterns, and writing with words, where students create sentences from a word bank of on-screen words. A culminating activity in each unit is The Decodable Book and Writing Lesson. In the latter, the student practices their new skills by writing a story with a similar theme to the anchor book. In Decodable Writing, students choose correct words to fill in sentences with missing words. When the sentence is completed, it is read aloud to the student. Optional games are provided at the end of each unit consisting of a concentration game, an obstacle game, and crossword puzzle game. Each provides immediate feedback and fun review.

The beauty of this program is that everything you need is integrated seamlessly into the activities! The activities are multi-modal and appeal to all types of learners. The teacher can shift the child's focus to the aspects that will strengthen weaknesses. This product can be used to teach all students in a family, whether beginning or remedial, whatever learning style.

Enough about all the technical stuff and fancy words. My kids found that this program was FUN and ENGAGING. My struggling reader really responded to the lessons and my beginning reader was enthralled with the beautiful presentation.

The entire Balanced Literacy package sells for $299. If that seems a bit high, consider the fact that this can be used for multiple children for multiple years! The additional black line masters in the teacher's manual can be copied over and over again.

IntelliTools Math Number Concepts 1 with Oshi the Otter

Designed for use with children in Kindergarten through second grade, Number Concepts 1 has children study number concepts in an ocean environment. As with the above product, record keeping is simple because students' work is saved in a printable portfolio.

The purpose of this program is to help the children learn number sense by giving them experiences in counting, numeration, number relationships, and beginning addition and subtraction. The activities take place on three seashore environments: a beach, a coral reef, and a tide pool.

Like Balanced Literacy above, the program is accessible to children with special needs by using special overlays or standard input devices. It's correlated to math textbooks and meets the standards of The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), so it can be used with any textbook in any setting. Black line masters are provided to make manipulatives to complement the work.

The accompanying teacher's manual contains many off-computer activities to reinforce and extend the computer work. Other helpful activities are presented, such as keeping a math journal.

So, what does this look like? The first activity is the counting activity which takes place on a beach. Seashore animals scurry in and out of a cave while students count using numbers 1 - 20. The student is either given a Show Me question or a How Many question. With a Show Me question, a number is displayed and the student is asked to show a corresponding number of sea animals. In a How Many question, a number of sea animals are shown and a student is asked to choose the corresponding number. An Explore Mode is available in which students can continue to work on these concepts in a less structured setting.

The next activity is the Greater Than/Less Than game, which takes place on a coral reef. Sea animals swim to opposite sides of the reef to give the child an opportunity to practice the concepts of greater than, less than, and equal to, using numbers 0 - 20. A Question and Answer Mode and an Explore Mode are also available here.

The Addition and Subtraction activity is set in a tide pool. Here sea animals are washed in or out with the waves. Students practice adding and subtracting the numbers 0 - 20. The teacher can set a specified problem range to control the level of challenge. The Question and Answer Mode and the Explore Mode are also available in this setting.

The colorful, fun feel of this program is very appealing. My kids loved moving and counting the sea animals. My beginning student immediately grasped some of the concepts. My struggling learner got some great reinforcement from the activities.

Number Concepts 1 sells for $79.95. Because the concepts are universal, it can be used with any curriculum as a great teaching tool or to reinforce.



-- Product Review by: Christine Field, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine

Special Note: When ordering from IntelliTools, please use the following code - TOS123 - to receive a 10 percent discount off the single unit price of any IntelliTools product. This offer does not apply to third party products, upgrades, bundles, or multiple unit purchases. This offer is open to US residents only. Please place your order at the IntelliTools online store at www.intellitools.com or call toll free at 800-899-6687 to receive this special discount.