Make Your Own Backyard Paradise

Make Your Own Backyard Paradise is an interesting, if totally strange, interactive from PBS. Students can select a background and choose from various objects in nonspecific categories (Thing-a-ma-bobs, Doo-Dads, Whatchamacalits), arrange, resize and rotate them to create a potentially absurd scene.

Language Lens

• Naming the objects in various categories could serve as a good word-finding and description activity.
• Arrangement and resizing of objects provides a good opportunity to work on spatial and temporal concepts.
• Discussion of why certain objects go well or look silly in the scene will contextually prompt causal sentence structures.
• The category names of the objects could help students with word retrieval difficulties become aware of nonspecific language.
• The "Letter" category could be used in a phonemic awareness activity.