Computing

Children in Year One need to learn to use technology purposefully to create, organise, store, manipulate and retrieve digital content. This can be anything from a Word document to a video or a photo. 

This week we'd like you to have a brief look at word processing at home, on whatever package you would usually use to write a letter - in school we use MSWord.

Show you child how to open a new word processing document from wherever you have your word processing program stored. Demonstrate how to write a simple sentence about yourself - be sure to remind children how to create a capital letter using the SHIFT key and the lower case letter and please show them where they can find a full stop to end their sentence. Do they know how to add spaces between the words? What is the key that we use to do that called?

Then demonstrate skills needed to change font, colour and size. We usually drag over a word to select it and then adjust these using the toolbar at the top, although some children may remember that you can also double click a word to select it. For children with weaker fine motor skills, it can be quite a challenge to just select one word to do this to. Can anyone create a rainbow sentence, using a different colour for each word?

Allow your child to then to type in an information sentence about their favourite farm animal.   

Run through with children how to save their word document in a specific folder. What would make a suitable name for their document? Now for a real challenge... Can they open it up again once they've saved it and closed the program?