Explanation Texts

Wild Earth African Safari

Initially I had reservations about using this game as I felt the storyline was too large and complex. However, after listening to Toby's feedback from his lessons and looking at some of the writing produced by his class, I decided to use it for my writing on explanation texts. (It did help that Toby spent a short time showing me how to navigate the game as I am not very good with explorations games.)

The first assignment on the game is to take certain photographs and explore the area. During this time the commentators are giving lots of useful and interesting information about the African plains and the plants and animals found there.

The children wrote comprehensive notes and we spent time as a class developing these into decent sentences, working on our school targets. Once the children collected lots of information, discreet teaching on features of explanation texts was completed. In word and sentence level work, particular focus was placed on organising of sentences into paragraphs. (The next step in our school targets.)

All of the children wrote an explanation text using the notes they had collected from the game. I allowed the children to be fairly independent in their organisation (something I was able to do due to using the Wii several times and having confidence in the children with the work they produce). Some children wrote a very tightly focused explanation text on elephants, whereas others wrote about Safety on Safari, or similar.

Despite the independence in focus, the lessons were very tightly monitored and lots of guided reading and writing took place. Therefore, in the second part of this unit I decided to give the children free reigns. They spent time researching a chosen topic and wrote their own explanation text using all of the knowledge they had learnt.

Starters and introductions to lessons focused on the word and sentence level targets and the features of explanation texts still. All of the children were able to transfer their knowledge and were naturally enthused by the subject.