SMART Boards can be used for editing practice. Place a teacher-created paper or student samples on the SMART Board. Students can take turns coming up to the board and marking errors. Use a different color pen or highlighter for each type of error. For example, students can highlight fragments with a yellow highlighter, run-ons with a blue highlighter and circle misspelled words in green. Teachers can also use the board for daily editing activities at the beginning of class, placing a sentence or short paragraph on the board and inviting students to make the necessary changes.
Teachers can help students brainstorm topics to write about and help organize papers. Teachers can place a general topic on the SMART Board and have students come up and write ideas related to the topic to create a web of writing ideas. Graphic organizers for certain types of writing can also be displayed on the board and filled in by the teacher to model for students how to write a specific type of paper.
A SMART Board can be used to review parts of speech and verb tenses to help students become better writers. Teachers can place sentences on the board and have students take turns coming up to highlight specific parts of speech in a sentence. If teachers have a SMART Response or Senteo system, they can create simple quizzes by leaving out the verb in a sentence and having students use the clickers to choose the correct form of the verb to place in the sentence. Teachers without a clicker system can place sentences on the board, leaving blanks for the verbs and creating movable tiles with possible verbs for students to drag into the sentence.
Students can play a variety of spelling games with a SMART Board. Teachers can set up a game of "Hangman" using the week's spelling words. Choose a mystery word and draw lines on the board to represent each letter of the mystery word. Have students guess letters, drawing a different part of a stick figure for each incorrect letter. Educational game websites such as Funbrain (funbrain.com/spell) and KidsSpell (kidsspell.com) offers games that can be played as a class using the SMART Board.