VAKT activities

A VAKT activity is a regulation break: a movement or sensory activity the speller does partway through a lesson. VAKT stands for visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile.

VAKT: Bob likes to do jumping jacks. Let's do 3 of those.

To add one, press VAKT activity in a section's toolbar and type the activity into the Activity field.

Not a question

A VAKT activity is its own kind of block, not a question:

• it's an instruction for whoever is running the lesson, not something the speller answers;
• it's never answered or scored;
• in interactive mode it isn't counted in the progress bar, and it appears with the section's reading material rather than as a step of its own;
• it isn't in the legend at the foot of each printed page, which only names question types.

How it looks

The whole activity prints in bright red, a color none of the question types or the spelling list use, so it stands out on a page of black text.

Every activity starts with the label VAKT:. The app adds the label for you, so just type the activity itself. If you type "VAKT:" at the start anyway, it isn't printed twice.

Pictures and links

Both are optional.

• A picture. Press Add image to upload one from your device or search for one on Pixabay or Wikimedia Commons (see Pictures). Once there's a picture, buttons under it set its alignment (left, center or right) and size (Small, Medium, Large or Full), and you can add a caption. A VAKT picture starts at Medium and centered, smaller than a normal picture block, since it illustrates the activity rather than carrying the lesson. Interactive mode ignores these settings and fits the picture to the screen.
• Links. Press Add link for a video to play, a song or something to print. Each link has an address and optional link text; a link with no text shows its address. On screen the links open in a new tab. On paper, where you can't click, each prints as its text followed by its address, so the address can be typed in.

Only web addresses (http:// or https://) and email links (mailto:) are kept. A link that's unfinished or uses anything else is left out when the lesson is shown or printed, but stays in the field so you can finish typing it.

Exporting and importing

Where	What's kept
Export JSON and back	Everything.
Export DOCX	The red, the picture at its size and alignment, and the links as real links.
Print PDF	The red, as in the Word document the PDF is made from.
Import Word document	The activity, its picture and its links. The picture comes back at Medium and centered, whatever it was set to before.

Word import finds activities by their "VAKT:" label, so a lesson typed by hand in Word with "VAKT:" lines imports too.

With an AI assistant

An AI assistant connected to Spelling Creator only adds VAKT activities when you ask for them. When it does, it puts one at the end of each section, after the questions.

For how this works, see the developer notes.