Mario Kart

When Using Mario Kart, we were working on two learning objectives: I can use a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences and I can organise sentences into paragraphs. These lessons were specifically focused towards our year group targets.

Before we used the Wii, we had two discrete lessons on sentence level work. Children were writing a variety of sentences which included adjectival phrases. Work was done on moving the subordinate clause within complex sentences.

On the first airing of Mario Kart, there was no racing whatsoever! The child in control simply hovered over each character in turn. The children had to brainstorm adjectives to describe the appearance of each character. Some children used their knowledge of racing to include description of personality too.

Whilst all of this was happening, I scribed some of my own ideas and some from the children onto our class whiteboard. The children then had to write descriptive sentences (or a paragraph) based on their chosen character.

The next day the writing progressed. Children were reminded about how to structure different ideas into paragraphs. The race began! During the race, the children had to consider different aspects. We thought about characters, scenery, weapons and enemies. Once again a lot of note taking took place where everyone was encouraged to use powerful language. It was great to hear similes, metaphors and personification being used with little adult input.

Finally the children wrote a series of paragraphs, each focusing on a different aspect of the race. The language was powerful and everybody was engaged. It is important to note that each time the children got lost in game play (and this did happen) the game was paused and attention was redirected to the learning objectives and success criteria.

Throughout the week's learning, we also managed to squeeze in a Mario Kart tournament involving the entire year group. Brilliant!

Using Wii Sport Resort

Having used Endless Ocean 2 and Wild African Safari which linked in beautifully with the class topic of Habitats, I was wondering what game to use in the Spring term - I could not see a game that fitted in so well with our class work, so I decided to do descrete English lessons using the Sports Resort game, focusing on sentence structure work. The children needed work on using more sophisticated connectives and commas to extend sentences.

To give the work some meaning, I told the children we would produce an explanatory poster about the game because we would also be producing explanatory texts in our topic work and this would be our way in to familiarising ourselves with the genre.

We played several different games but not all of them. For the first game we wrote phrases or simple sentences about how the game worked and how to play it, linked the sentences together in a sensible order to produce extended sentences. This was very much guided writing. We repeated the process for different games, each time I gave the children more independence in how they formed their sentences, then we evaluated them, redrafted and improved them (eg. swopped clauses, subsituted connectives for commas, introduced semi-colons) etc. It soon became obvious that many features were similar throughout the game and the children suggested a general paragraph, or introduction, covering these points.

The work was successful because the children were able to move on to their next piece of work, an explanatory leaflet about Darwin and show improved sentence work - everything from the least able children who used to find writing a sentence difficult and were now using full stops correctly, to the children who always wrote simple sentences and now were using 'and' 'so' and 'because' and finally the children who stuck with safe connectives and who now were choosing to use commas and extend sentences further (sometimes too far!).

However, if I was to use the game again, I might be tempted to do persuasive work - the children found it easier to put forward ideas for why the games were so good, what worked well, how it entertained them etc, then sticking to the facts of the game.

Curriculum Conferences

The teachers involved in this project will be presenting their work with the Wii at the two Curriculum Conferences in Suffolk on the 15th and 16th March 2011.  Resources that have been created during the project to support the use of Wild Earth African Safari, Endless Ocean/Endless Ocean 2, Another Code R and Mario Kart will be available on this blog and the Suffolk Learning Hub at the same time.  Also available then will be a request form for Suffolk schools to use to apply to borrow one set of Wii equipment for up to a term.