Interactive Night Before Christmas - Baggetta

1 Interactive Night Before Christmas FreeWare from Baggetta_Ware 2006 Version Objectives: Introduce your students to the every popular seasonal poem 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (or A Visit from St. Nicholas) by Clement Clarke Moore. Give student the practice of reading and observing carefully. This Windows Interactive software will give your students the opportunity to read the poem carefully on screen. As they read they will be asked a series of questions about the poem s content. The program is meant to be an interesting exercise that scores the student s progress. Teachers can choose to use it as a fun seasonable project or actually use it as a reading test. No special locks have been placed on the program so all users are on their own honest behavior. Using Interactive Night Before Christmas After you install the program on your Windows PC or network, you can use the desktop icon to start the program.

2 You will first see a Rules screen like the one shown here. It is important that you read the rules carefully. Errors in your answers will usually come from not following all of the rules and also not observing carefully and thinking logically as to what the answer might be. All of the answers are going to be either one word answers (keywords taken from the actual poem) or hyphenated words used in the poem. After you read the rules, click the Close button to begin the poem examination. You can return to the Rules screen anytime by clicking the Snowflake in the upper right of the main work screen shown here. When the program first starts the first stanza is placed on screen. You will only have to answer questions from the stanzas that are visible on screen. Read the question placed at the bottom of the screen, carefully.

3 When you think you have the one-word answer, type it in the window next to the question and then click OK. You won t get a second chance so be sure your answer is correct. The fun of this, of course, is not knowing whether you are thinking the same way the computer is thinking. Most of the answers are rather easy but some of them can be tricky. In any event you will have a thorough reading of the poem when you are done. If you have a sound card in your Windows PC, by the way, you will hear some rather holiday sound effects. You can turn these off by shutting off the volume of your sound card. An incorrect answer will result in a Bah! Humbug! comment at the bottom of the screen, shown here. You will notice that the error here was spelling of the word Christmas (read the rules). The correct answer is displayed. As you progress through the questions a simple scoring window appears at the lower right of the screen.

4 The final result will be displayed as right and wrong answers at the end of the program. If you get an answer correct, you will get a Jolly Good Answer message and your score will be recorded accordingly. Notice, too, that the OK button has now changed to NEXT. To get the next question (there are 51 in all for the 13 stanzas), click the NEXT button. Some students are rather daring and might feel they already know the poem by heart and might like to try the SNOWBLIND option available. When this button is clicked (it is a toggle button to turn the option off or on), the text will disappear from the screen, but the questions can still be answered. When all of the questions have been exhausted, a final scoring screen is presented similar to the one shown here. Hopefully your score will be much better. The program has some sound effects to make play more interesting, and you can also print the entire poem with colorful graphics, by clicking the Print Poem button.

5 You will need a printer connected to your computer as a default. Baggetta_Ware offers this program as FreeWare. While we have check its operation on several machines, there could still be a hidden bug in the program. Therefore, we offer no guarantees. If you notice any problems with the program, please let us know and we will try to fix them. Have a fun holiday season in all of your classes. A. Baggetta Baggetta_Ware Teacher Tech