Writing In Different Styles

About this unit:

Introduce children to word processing and desktop publishing using a number of different tools and design tasks.

National Curriculum Links - Computing KS1

The content of this plan cover the following NC strands:

use technology purposefully to create, organise, store, manipulate and retrieve digital content
recognise common uses of information technology beyond school

Curriculum Mapping

Why this? What does it build on?

This unit looks at the key skills of becoming familiar with a keyboard, beginning to type with two hands and word processing and desktop publishing skills. These are all key skills that will underpin future learning for students and help them to work more efficiently with digital devices. The lessons follow on from the Year 1 unit Making multimedia stories and also incorporate some of the drawing skills learned in An introduction to digital art.

What comes next?

Our scheme of work contains a wide range of units that cover different ways of creating and editing multimedia digital artifacts. Students revisit desktop publishing, combining text, images and other multimedia to a much deeper level in our Key Stage 2 units; Communication and collaboration and Building collaborative websites.

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Take a look at our full curriculum map to see how units across all year groups, from Year 1 to Year 6 link.

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Unit Resources

Lesson Slides

Detailed lesson slides for you to use when delivering this unit of work with your class

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Unit Assessment Sheet

Use our simple assessment system to measure your students' success in this unit of work.

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Lessons

Lesson 1

Begin to use two hands for typing
To understand and use good posture when typing
To understand and use Caps Lock and Shift appropriately for typing capital letters.

Terrific Typing

Lesson 2

To begin to use two hands for typing
To apply simple formatting to text
To import images into a document
To use keyboard shortcuts to work more efficiently

Read All About It

Lesson 3

To begin to use two hands for typing
To apply simple formatting to text
Use speech bubbles, thought bubbles and text boxes
Combine images and text

Kapow! Comic Strips

Lesson 4

To use two hands for typing
To design your own layout for a document
To apply simple formatting to text
To import images into a document

A Blank Canvas

Lesson 5 & 6

To use two hands for typing
To design your own layout for a document
To apply simple formatting to text
To import images into a document
To use a spell checker
To compare two pieces of software

Publish it, check it!

Suggested Software

2Publish + (from Purple Mash or as part of the 2Simple Collection)
Microsoft Publisher
Book Creator - web or app versions (optional)
Google Docs (optional)

Full Computing Glossary

Take a look at our full computing glossary, plus key vocabulary for each age group.

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Key computing vocabulary for this unit

Alter - to change the way something looks, sometimes using a computer or other digital tools

Copyright - legal protection that a creators have over the things they create

Digital content – any media created, edited or viewed on a computer, such as text (including the hypertext of a web page), images, sound, video, or virtual environments, and combinations of these (i.e. multimedia).

Edit - To change, add or remove elements in a piece of work (usually to improve it).

Format (text) - Text formatting refers to the attributes of text other than the actual text itself. For example: bold, italics, underlining, colour, and size, are all formatting attributes of text.

Import - A computing command that usually means allowing a user to bring in a file, or part of a file into another application so they can be combined. For example, an image could be imported into presentation slides, or art software to use as a background.

Media - all of the ways that large groups of people get and share information (TV, books, internet, newspapers, phones, etc).

Save - To store a piece of work in a computer’s memory so that it can be recalled at a later time.