ICT at key stages 1 and 2    (Year 3)

• Show the class a range of greeting cards. Discuss the designs and point out elements, such as pictures, fonts, captions and messages. Divide the class into groups and ask each group to examine one card. Ask them to produce an annotated poster identifying the card's key features.
• Look at messages and how they are written. Ask children to think about cards that they could design and produce.

• Type in a number of words, eg 'rainbow', 'grow', 'lean', 'high', 'low', 'stairs' and 'ghost'.
• Show the class font editing features, such as how to change font type, size and colour. Ask the children to change the look of each word so that it reflects its meaning, eg placing each letter of 'rainbow' in a different colour, increasing the font size of each letter in 'grow'.

• Type in a piece of text using 'nice' as the only adjective.
• Remind the class how to edit text by highlighting words and over-typing them. Demonstrate how to save work and give it a sensible name. Ask the children to edit the text using more varied adjectives and to save their work.

• Prepare examples of text which would benefit from illustrations eg a description of a pyramid. Demonstrate to the class how to locate, retrieve, insert and add a graphic into a piece of text. Show the class how to re-size a graphic so that it fits on the page. Ask the children to search a clip art file or a CD-ROM to locate graphics and copy them into a piece of text.

• Enter a piece of text and replace all the punctuation marks with 'x'.
• Discuss how authors use punctuation marks for effect and remind the class how to use the shift key to type upper case letters. Show them how the key can be used to type other characters.
• Ask the children to replace each 'x' with the correct punctuation. Ask them to print out their work.

• Tell the class that they are going to produce a class magazine, which will include pictures and captions, and explain that they will use punctuation and font effects.
• Divide the children into pairs and ask them to choose a theme for a page in the magazine. Get them to create, or capture, a picture for their page and ask them to caption the picture. Tell the children to print their work and bring the work together to form the magazine. Finally, discuss with the class the advantages of using ICT.