Curriculum Companions
Fun, supplemental onscreen activities designed to enhance your curriculum!
What are Curriculum Companions?
Fun for students to use, and easy for educators to adapt, Curriculum Companions are adapted activities that offer different levels of symbol support, as well as prompting and vocabulary building tools, to improve reading comprehension.
They also offer a range of supported writing and practice activities designed to supplement your daily lessons. The interactive, onscreen Curriculum Companion content can be viewed with Boardmaker Plus!, Boardmaker Player or Boardmaker with Speaking Dynamically Pro. With Boardmaker Plus!, you can take your Curriculum Companions one step further and modify their content to suit your students’ unique needs.
Curriculum Companions are designed to be used with any curriculum and academic standards you currently use to guide your instruction.
Features and Benefits
- Every activity can be adapted with different levels of support.
- Every interactive, onscreen activity is designed with the teacher and student in mind.
- Activities align with content-area curriculum while incorporating reading and writing supports that provide students with opportunities to practise and demonstrate what they have learned.
- The same types of activities are offered on different topics so students become familiar with the activity structure – even when working with new subjects!
- Onscreen instructions guide you through applying changes to existing activities so you can modify and adjust them to suit different goals and abilities – with or without substantial knowledge of the Boardmaker Software Family.
Curriculum Companions are designed to be used with multiple students and teachers can track their individual progress with student management tools. You can evaluate student progress and performance with student and teacher-friendly summary reports.
With Curriculum Companions, you can help your students succeed:
- Time-saving curriculum supports that complement your existing instruction on each topic.
- Ready-made practice activities that support skill-building in reading and writing.
- Ready-made quizzes to help you evaluate and celebrate student progress.
- Multiple support levels that you can customise for each student and save with student-specific activity settings.
How do Curriculum Companions work?
Each of the 12 Curriculum Companions includes activities focused on reading, writing, practising and quizzing, all with adjustable levels of complexity and prompting support to suit each student’s individual needs and goals.
- Reading Supports
Reading supports for successful reading comprehension include text-to-speech, visual supports, interactive glossaries, idea maps and automatic visual and auditory prompting and reinforcement that:- Expand vocabulary as students learn new concepts
- Improve reading comprehension using photographs, illustrations and symbols
- Promote student and teacher interaction to build background knowledge and establish links to previous learning experiences.
- Writing Supports
Writing support for successful expression of learning include a range of activities like errorless writing grids, sentence building templates and target word banks to:- Help students demonstrate understanding of content
- Motivate students to try more challenging methods of written expression
- Increase confidence with unique activities that suit individual skills
- Practice
Through practice tests, students can demonstrate what they have learned and get feedback on their progress. Practice activities include:- sorting
- classifying
- labelling
- fill-in-the-blank
- multiple choice
- true/false questions and more.
- Quiz
Teachers can use the provided quizzes to evaluate student understanding of new concepts as they track progress.
How can I use Curriculum Companions to strengthen my curriculum?
Designed to save you time while enriching your students’ learning experience, Curriculum Companions supplement your existing curriculum with enjoyable, interactive activities that also give your students opportunities to practise and demonstrate skills as they are learning. Curriculum Companions also help you:
- Save valuable time by applying ready-to-use materials with fully-accessible content that is aligned with academic standards
- Adapt activities to suit students with different abilities by adjusting the levels of support-with just a few clicks!
- Support multiple students on a shared computer by saving student-specific activity settings
- Engage students with academically appropriate content and activities with the scaffolding instruction they need to be successful (auditory prompts, visual cues, symbols)
- Create teacher-and student-friendly summary reports to track and celebrate student progress
- Promote practice at home by helping parents follow through with activities outside of the classroom
With Curriculum Companions, students learn new reading, writing, language, science and social studies skills within fun and familiar contexts. Appropriate for students of all ages and abilities with academic goals in the K-2 grade-level, each Curriculum Companion includes 18 interactive, computer-based activities so students can enjoy practising new skills as they learn them.
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- Curriculum Companion: All About Plants
- Curriculum Companion: Amazing Animals
- Curriculum Companion: Community Faces and Places
- Curriculum Companion: From Here to There
- Curriculum Companion: Healthy Choices
- Curriculum Companion: How Our Nation Began
- Curriculum Companion: It's Alive!
- Curriculum Companion: Nature's Neighbourhoods
- Curriculum Companion: Our Country: The United States
- Curriculum Companion: The Changing Seasons
- Curriculum Companion: What's the Weather
- Curriculum Companion: Your Body: Inside and Out
- Curriculum Companions Pre-made Boardmaker Activities