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!
There's some interesting writing there Helen - I guess they enjoyed using this game!
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