Oxford Reading Tree MagicPage

overview

Oxford Reading Tree Magic Page is designed for shared literacy work on the interactive whiteboard. It contains six stories with Assessment for Learning integrated throughout. It is a valuable tool for the teaching of reading, giving the practitioner the ‘big book’ experience on the interactive whiteboard: exploring, predicting, thinking about characters, reading, changing and editing the story. We met the author and illustrator, hot seat characters, investigated the meaning of words and used the appropriate phonics. You can annotate, save and print with the tools option. The CD-ROM covers Stages 1, 1+ and 2, bringing to life six books the children recognise and use in the classroom. It is an effective asset for group and whole class teaching.

There is a menu for each title. The ‘Talk’ option leads to five further choices to introduce the story: ‘Look’, ‘Listen’, ‘Watch’, ‘Meet’ and ‘Guess’. These use multi-media resources to promote the discussion needed to begin looking at a book. Images, sound and film with which children can identify are linked to the story’s subject, even the opportunity to guess the book’s title. ‘Read’ plays the story automatically or allows you to turn the pages like a real book. The audio models telling the story in Stage 1 (which has no words) or reads the text.

‘About’ lets us meet the author, Roderick Hunt and illustrator, Alex Brychta. They are interviewed by a child talking about the books; how the stories were created to how to draw expressions. The program allows you to pause the film at any point.

‘Explore’ gives hotspots through the pages with activities linked to word recognition or language comprehension. Thought bubbles show what the characters are thinking and hot seating has characters answering questions. Other hotspots lead to spelling, using words and the appropriate phonics for the level.

‘Edit’ allows you to type our own text and use the tools to annotate or insert speech bubbles in the story.

‘Change’ gives alternative pages to choose to make our own version of the book.

The menus are easy to follow; all the icons allow you to navigate the program quickly to enable you find the area you need to cover. This is invaluable as the depth of material allows you to plan many opportunities to revisit each title, finding new activities for discussion and assessment, keeping the class engaged and focused.

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