Interactive Amplify sits at the Interactive row and Amplify column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real English lessons for elementary school (KS2, Years 3 to 6, ages 7 to 11) that sit in Interactive Amplify, plus anti-examples that look like it but sit elsewhere.
Grade 3 post the main idea of The Selfish Giant to a class Padlet
The class reads Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant together, with the teacher reading aloud and pupils following on the board. Each pupil then writes, in one sentence of their own, what they think the main idea of the story is and posts it to a class Padlet set to school login, signed with their first name only. The teacher scrolls the wall with the class, picks four responses that say quite different things, from 'the giant learns to share' to 'the garden was sad', and asks each pupil to point to the part of the story that made them think so. The class then uses the like reaction to pick the idea that best fits the whole story, and the teacher shows how a main idea differs from a single event.
Grade 4 groups place mood words on stanzas of The Highwayman in Padlet Sandbox
The teacher sets up a Padlet Sandbox with one card per group of three or four, each showing six stanzas of Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman and a row of movable mood-word labels: excited, menacing, fearful, desperate, defiant and grieving. Groups discuss each stanza, drag a mood word onto it and move it again if their reading changes. In the plenary the teacher flicks through the groups' cards on the board, stops on stanzas where groups chose different moods, such as the stanza where Bess pulls the trigger, and asks each group to read the line that convinced them. The class finishes by agreeing a mood for each stanza and listing the words Noyes uses to create it.
Grade 4 Lexia Core5 comprehension session with a teacher-led group chosen from its report
Year 5 use Lexia Core5 three times a week. Each pupil works at their own level in the programme, which placed them when they started and then moves them on, or switches to a more guided version of an activity, depending on how accurately they answer. In today's session most of the class work through their current Core5 activities with headphones, many of them short passages with comprehension questions. Using the class report from the previous session, the teacher takes the four pupils Lexia flagged as stuck on the same skill for a ten-minute session using one of Lexia's scripted teacher-led lessons. At the end the teacher checks the report again to plan the next group.
Grade 5 predict and vote on the next chapter of Kensuke's Kingdom on Padlet
At the end of a chapter of Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom, such as the moment Michael finds food and water left for him on the island, each pupil posts a one-sentence prediction of what happens next to a class Padlet set to school login, signed with their first name only. Pupils read the wall and add a vote reaction to the two predictions they think most likely, so the class favourites stand out. The teacher reads the next chapter aloud, and the class returns to the wall to see which predictions came closest and which clues in the text supported them. Each pupil then adds a comment to their own post saying what their prediction missed.
Lessons that look Interactive Amplify but sit in another
Useful counter-examples when you are checking your own lesson placement on the PICRAT grid.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.