Creating bespoke educational resources

Creating new educational resources

We’re continuously looking to create grid sets that are relevant to the needs of our users. As Education Specialist, I am always interested in seeing the different ways that The Grid 2 and Grid 3 are used in the school environment for both communication and learning.

Bespoke grid sets

As a team, we all really enjoy working with our users to help them make the grids that they need.

One of our Assistive Technology Specialists, Shaun, recently visited a school that was looking to use Grid 3 more widely. They also asked him about the possibility of creating some sentence building activities within the software – and as the resident teacher on the team, Shaun asked me if I’d have a go.

It’s always good to sit down and make a bespoke grid set – to look at how we use the existing functionality within the software, and how we can use it differently. It’s also good to think about features that we might want in the software in the future.

Combining communication and educational software

I’m very keen for people who are already using Grid 3 for communication to have the opportunity to use it for learning activities too, where appropriate.

There is then less need to keep switching between communication and educational software, as is sometimes the case, and leaving the user temporarily voiceless.

Sentence building, amongst many other things on my ‘resource ideas list’, is something that I’ve wanted to make in Grid 3 for a while now. I think it would be such a useful grid set that could be utilised by schools and other organisations. I’m also pretty certain it would be fairly easy to set up.

Creating a sentence building grid set

In response to the request, I created a sample grid set looking at a few different ways of building sentences in Grid 3.

I used jumps to create forced order sentence building (above), and word lists to create free sentence building (below).

These were created either with or without a model sentence above the words for support.

Download Sentence Building

I was rather pleased with the result (especially as the three different sentence building activities took me less than half an hour to create from scratch).

Using word lists it is quick for a teacher to edit the sentence and to adapt the activity without having to take the time to set up the grid. I’m all for speedy editing of a templated activity!

Find more existing educational grid sets