Bloom: It’s Not Just for Books

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Learning is such an involved and mysterious process that coming up with good, simple tools that work for beginners is far more complex than it might first seem. If you’re a parent contemplating helping your children learn at home for the first time because of the Coronavirus, you may find yourself facing a dizzying selection of worksheet options—each one of them the product of years of research.

But for the parents of children in some language communities, finding good learning tools is just as (or more) challenging than finding good childrens’ books.

This is why our Executive Director, Dr. Paul Frank, has created a suite of Bloom templates for various kinds of non-book educational materials and uploaded them to the Bloom library. These templates were originally created for the SIL LEAD’s Afghanistan project last fall, but like all Bloom templates they can be adapted and transformed to suit the needs of any language community.

We’ll list these templates below, and we encourage you to try each of them out—perhaps even translating the instructions pages to other languages, to be added to the master version as a way to increase their accessibility to language communities around the world!

  • FILL IN THE BLANKS: this template enables the user to create A5 sheets with four rows of three pictures, with a blank line underneath. You identify words that you want your students to write, then add pictures to the sheet to represent each of those words.

  • ALPHABET CHART: This template is for creating A3 alphabet charts with pictures, letters, and words.

  • FLASH CARD TEMPLATE: This is a template for creating flash cards. There is one page layout for letters, one for syllables or words, one for both a picture and a word, and one for just a picture.

  • LET’S COUNT TO 10!: This book is a template for writing a book for counting 1 to 10. It has no pictures or words--you will provide your own!

  • MEMORY GAME CARDS TEMPLATE: This template allows you to make Memory Game cards. You can make them with pictures or with words or letters. There will be two cards that are exactly alike, and the students have to try to find the ones that match.

  • MISSING LETTERS TEMPLATE: This template allows you to make pages of words with missing letters and pictures of those words.

  • PICTURE CARD TEMPLATE: This template is for creating Picture Cards. You can create cards that show objects or cards that show situations.

  • POSTER TEMPLATE: This template is for creating posters. You add pages that contain only a picture. Then you add text boxes to the page by opening the Comic Tool, clicking where it says "Text Block", and dragging that to the place on the image where you want to put the text.

  • STORY PAGES TEMPLATE: This template lets you create pages that have one story and one picture on them.

We would love to have your help in making these materials available to as many parents and educators as possible. So have fun with them, and please let us know about your experience!