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.