Spinout Stories

Spinout Stories are collections of high interest stories and related activities especially designed to appeal to upper primary and lower secondary students who are still struggling with literacy.

Each story is available at three levels of reading difficulty, to suit a wide range of students.

Topics to suit older “early” readers
There are two topics in each pack.
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.

Pack

Story

Topic

Style

Blue

Diesels and Dirt

large machines

information

The best mechanic

large machines

fiction

Saltwater Crocodiles

crocodiles

information

Reptile Zoo

crocodiles

narrative

Red

Gorilla Gang

dreams

fiction

Dream to stay alive

dreams

information

Shark Ride Bay

surfing

fiction

Surf Shop

surfing

narrative

Enrichment reading
Clicking on key words gives access to Spinout’s powerful hypertext facility, which encourages 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, clicking on “trucks” (or on the truck in the picture) 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.

Read it, hear it, write it, print it!
The computer can read all the story text aloud (with an Australian accent). It can also help students check their own reading by saying individual words (in a different voice) upon request.

Students can use Spinout’s facilities to write their own version of a story and print it, complete with all the illustrations, in black and white or colour.

Full colour books
The Spinout stories are supplied in book form as well as on CD. Extra copies are available: contact Greygum Software for details.

Extra skill-building exercises
Each CD contains related reading activities, based on the text of the stories on the CD. The activities are designed to develop students’ basic skills and to give them confidence in reading and understanding. All the exercises have been carefully designed by experienced teachers.

Pack

Exercise

Activity

Blue

Jigsaw

word recognition

Concentration

memory game requiring word recognition

Ladders

building vocabulary

Red

Cloze

reading with comprehension

Wordsquare

word recognition exercise

Quiz

comprehension test

Meeting individual needs
Using the Teacher Controls, Spinout Stories can be set up to meets the needs of individual students. Level of difficulty, fonts, special needs requirements and availability of printing are just some of the options that can be set.

The teacher can also check a log of the time each student spends on each activity to help identify an individual’s strengths and possible weaknesses.

Bonus package
Also included in each pack is a copy of Spinworks, a powerful teacher’s helper that turns any of the Spinout Stories, PM Story Books, Fitzroy Talking Readers or any text file into a set of worksheets in seconds. Details...