Spinout Stories are collections of high interest stories especially designed to appeal to upper primary and lower secondary students who are still struggling with literacy.
The stories are also suitable for use in Adult Literacy programs and for students of English as a Second Language (ESL).
Each story is available at three levels of reading difficulty, allowing the student to start at a suitably easy level and progress at gentle stages through to more demanding words and sentence constructions.
• Topics to suit older “early” readers
• There are two topics in each app.
• Each topic offers two stories of different styles.
Some stories are fictional, some are informative. Some are both. All are designed to grab the attention of reluctant readers.
The stories in the Spinout Blue collection are...
• The Best Mechanic - Topic "Large Machines", Fiction
• Diesels and Dirt - Topic "Large Machines", Information
• Reptile Zoo - Topic "Crocodiles", Narrative
• Saltwater Crocodiles - Topic "Crocodiles", Information
In the hard-level stories, tapping key words (in blue) gives access to Spinout’s powerful hypertext facility, which allows students to follow up more details of the story. This encourages students to read more and more in order to obtain information beyond the basic text of the main story.
For example, tapping “trucks” opens a new window of text that gives more detailed information about trucks. This text offers further links to words such as “engine” and “tray”, giving even more leads for students to follow their particular interests and encouraging them to read more adventurously.
The software allows the student to hear individual words and whole pages spoken in a clear, recorded voice while visually tracking the written text - each word is highlighted as it is spoken.