Anyone who has ever had to assemble a piece of furniture knows how important it is to learn to follow instructions. Effective teachers instruct 5th-grade students how to follow logical instructions by using several online sequencing tools. One website that uses hidden-picture games to put instructions in order is Quia.com. To reveal a hidden picture, students must look at the various steps of a process -- such as brushing your teeth or carving a pumpkin -- and number each step in the correct order. Students can immediately check their answers to see if they are correct and see the hidden picture.
Reading and organizing steps of a recipe helps 5th-graders to see the logical order a process follows. Since many children at this age start to take an interest in cooking or they at least like to provide input on what they eat, this is an excellent real-life example that students can relate to. Teachers often allow students to analyze recipes of their favorite foods online, such as on the Home & Family Network website, which has recipes geared toward children. After getting an idea of how food is made, students then practice their cooking skills with online recipe sequencing activities, like organizing the steps in a recipe for cheese sauce.
One way that students are tested on state standardized assessments is by having to read a story and then put the events of the story in chronological order. School book publishers often provide activities to reinforce these skills since they are aligned with state standards. Harcourt Publishers, a company that provides textbooks to public school systems, offers online sequencing activities for 5th-graders to practice with exactly what they would see on a standardized test.
Fifth-grade students who have special needs and mental disabilities or who may be learning English as a second language tend to need extra help with reading-comprehension skills. Teachers use online sequencing activities with visual cues to help these students understand how to organize story events. The PBS Kids website provides an online "Story Scramble" game that uses the popular characters from the "Arthur" animated series and books. Students read sentences, use pictures and can even click a button to have the sentence read aloud to them, all in an effort to put the events in the correct order.