Hands down, some of the most popular resources in my store are my sequencing sentences. Currently I have four different sets: The Giving Tree, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Miss Nelson Is Missing, and How I Became a Pirate. All of the sets are based on the same basic lesson plan: after reading the book, students use the sentence strips to reorder and retell the story. Personally, I have printed the sentence strips on card stock, laminated, and cut them for use over multiple years. I’ve heard other teachers print them on paper and have the students glue them into interactive notebooks. Either way, students get a lot of good practice sequencing and retelling the events of the stories. As we’ve been making the transition to more digital learning, I wanted to make the activity digital. I used the same sentences, but created a drag and drop activity in Google Slides. Initially, I created my sentence strips by making a text box, inserting my elements, and saving it as an image. This prevents students from accidentally changing any of the text. Then, I created a single slide Google Slide deck and inserted my chosen background. Finally, I uploaded all of my sentence strip images and arranged them, out of order, on the slide. Now, when I want to assign the activity, I simply make a copy for each student and give them editing rights. Students are then able to, while in edit mode, drag the sentence strips around the page to sequence the story’s events. If the slide is placed in present mode, nothing is movable and the activity cannot be completed.

In order to have students do the retelling portion of the assignment I would approach it in one of several ways. If the student is old enough to type, I might add a second slide that consists only of a text box before sharing the assignment. Then the student could, on the second slide, type out his/her retelling of the story. If the student wasn’t able to, or didn’t want to, type the story, I could instruct him/her to use the voice typing feature that is built into Google Slides to insert the retelling into the speaker notes (Tools-Voice Type Speaker Notes). Another option could be to use an add-on such as mote to leave voice comments. The possibilities truly are endless