Uses for Wikihow in Literacy

So here is a great recommendation. If you are a teacher working with your class on instructional text then I would recommend using Wikihow. It reminded me of the How Stuff Works site but is characterised with wiki features – you can freely contribute articles and edit others.

So how would you use it in your class?

Well with my Year 6 class, I am always on the look out for real, purposeful opportunities to write. In our 1st week on instructional text we wrote for an audience of children in Sydney. In this second week I wanted to get practical – so the children could make something in the classroom and then we would write up those instructions. Wikihow provides you and your class an excellent opportuntiy to publish what you write to a wider audience and as it is a site taking requests for instructions, there is also a real human purpose to putting pen to paper.

So we decided to answer a request for “How to make a Healthy Breakfast Drink”. The week’s planning, for 5 literacy lessons, included other independent tasks related to instructional text work – but the shared time was planned out to work on this request.

Monday

We introduced the site and explored the framework we had to write to. I highlighted the audience and purpose of our writing. As a class we recapped the instructional text features and talked briefly about our targets for the week, what did we want to achieve? It boiled down to: By Friday we want to submit a well written instructional article to Wikihow.

Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday

I divided the class into groups of 10 children and on these consecutive days they worked with a teaching assistant on our healthy smoothie recipe which I had done some preparation on. The group worked together and prepared, made and tasted the smoothie and also recorded brief notes on the procedure on a large flipchart. A digital camera was used to capture various stages. (These images will be used in the Wikihow article later.)

Whilst the groups were working with the TAs I worked with the rest of the class on some word level games such as dictionary races etc. The remaining children then went to work on their independent tasks.

Friday

So this turned out to be our big writing session. We worked together as a class to produce the instructions for the Wikihow article. We worked directly in the text frames on the Wikihow site, but could have easily done this elsewhere.

I really like the structure of the Wikihow article and it is simple enough to follow – just be aware that the “You will need” list is an optional extra. Scroll to the bottom of the text frames and there are some check boxes to add on writing sections, for example “Warnings” or “Top Tips”.

Take a look at our finished piece of writing titled “How to Make a Healthy Breakfast Drink”

If you are looking for a great source of instructional text then there is a huge number of articles to choose from. The content is closely monitored by the editors and seems ideal for school use.

So what else can you do with the site:

• Use as a guided reading text during your literacy hour – if you feel something is missing then why not edit the article and make additions. (Guided writing)
• Read some text as a whole class when identifying the language features of an instructional text. Use your whiteboard tools to highlight and annotate the article.
• Use the writing guides available on the site, they work in line with the literacy objectives from the Primary Strategy (UK)
• Look for a related activity or article that you can carry out in a different subject area. For example making a rubber band guitar could be done when looking at sound in science lessons. There are lots to choose from.
• Post a request yourself. If there is nothing that you would like to respond to then post something worthy of your efforts. Make it relevant to your curriculum work – if you are doing the Romans then why not post a request for “How to make a model Roman shield” – then get your kids making it and write the instructions in literacy, a good cross curricular link.
• Create a set of instructions over a short period of time. I will be editing our article with some images taken during the activity. The writing could be added to – slowly improving your work. Also don’t fret too much if others do this – remember that is what makes this so great, a collaborative writing effort.
• As I have done with my class – why not respond to a request for instructions, make or create it so the children get a first hand experience and then incorporate the writing as part of your shared work in the literacy lessons.