Using Symbols effectively in your Literacy activities
The following notes should help you,
the teacher, make symbol-supported materials in Express Literacy,
and to give helpful hints when looking at symbols, layout
and phrasing in your literacy screens.
Though it is very easy to turn symbols
on and off in any of your documents you may find that just
typing does not give you the picture you necessarily want.
To make your piece of work effective, useful and meaningful
you may need to give the matter some thought.
Symbols differ from just pictures
in that they have a grammatical and visual structure that
directly supports words and phrases. Far from just adding
pictures to words, you are learning to change what is written
and link words to correct symbols to ensure that the information
you create is useful.
Look at the example below.
1. Never just type - The example below
is misleading to someone who is just learning to read. It
uses the wrong meanings for some words and is cluttered.
Think about the wording of each sentence
you use. Imagine what it would look like in symbols only.
Remember you can turn symbols off for individual words so
that you only use relevant, key symbols that support the text.
2. Use the correct meaning - some
words have different symbols to reflect the different meanings
they might have in a sentence. Use F12 to toggle between the
choices.
3. Remove symbols that make no sense
to the user - Turn off symbols by using F12 or use a different
word that makes more sense. Remember that you can rename any
symbol permanently in your wordlist (using F11).
4. Our original example sentence should
look something like this:
NB: We have renamed the symbol
for 'garden' using the F11 function key.
5. Look at layout. Until you understand
full stops, for example, you have no idea where one sentence
ends and the next begins. You may wish to put the two sentences
in this example on separate lines. Seeing complete sentences
in this way will help children learn about sentence structure,
with objects, subjects and verbs more easily seen. It is good
to repeat words if you can.
6. Replace pronouns with the noun
to which it refers - Pronouns can be very difficult to understand,
and it is always good to repeat an image. In this way there
are fewer symbols to comprehend and the subject of each sentence
is clearer. In this example, 'it' has been replaced with 'swan'
for visual repetition and easier comprehension.
7. Remove symbols that have back arrows
as qualifiers to show past tense - Arrows can add visual clutter
if they are not understood. For some words, type the present
tense of the word and use F11 to rename the word to the past
tense to make grammatical sense. In our example the symbol
for 'saw' has been replaced with the symbol for 'see'.
8. Your piece of writing should now
look much clearer:
9. Fill in the gaps - Children can sometimes
feel that they are missing out if there are words on the page
without symbols. You may therefore wish that all words or phrases
in your activity screen have a symbol. Decide which words or
phrases belong to each symbol, then press F11 under the relevant
symbols and retype the words there.
See the example below. Every word
or short phrase will now have relevant or meaningful symbols
attached to it, presented in a clear and obvious way.
In this way you can pitch your materials
at the right level for your pupils, which will enable them
to understand, refer to and look at more of its message.
You now have a piece
of work that is effective, symbol supported and helpful.
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