Perfect Publishing

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?(opens in new tab)

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?(opens in new tab)

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.

View our full curriculum map

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(opens in new tab)

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

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Unit Assessment Sheet(opens in new tab)

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

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Lessons

Lesson 1

To become familiar with the layout of a keyboard
To begin to use two hands for typing
To understand and use the Shift key for capital letters.

Terrific Typing

Lesson 2

To begin to use two hands for typing
To apply simple formatting to text
Combine text and images for a design project.

Happy birthday to you

Lessons 3 & 4

Use two hands for typing
Plan and design a leaflet
Import images into a design project.
Format text to enhance a design project.

Promoting our school

Lesson 5 & 6

To use two hands for typing
To design your own layout for a poster
Format the appearance of a poster
To import images into a document

Publishing Posters

Suggested Software

Purple Mash offers age appropriate and easy to use software.

The projects in this unit could be achieved with other publishing software such as:

Canva
Book Creator - web or app versions (optional)
Google Docs
Microsoft Publisher or PowerPoint.

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.