In the summer term, I chose to use Endless Ocean, my first and favourite game that I used with the older children.
Teaching
(all objectives had been covered in some way since the Spring term so we were not learning anything brand new. The success criteria for each piece of writing was established before each session)
1st peice of writing: Diary. Children took turns to swim around the coral and the class gave me descriptive words; these words were adjectives to describe the coral and sea bed and fish. Once they understood what I wanted them to think of, I asked each of them to write down their words on their white boards.
In the following session we wrote adverbs on whiteboards to describe the way the fish moved. A further lesson on looking at an extract of Blue Planet (BBC) gave us further ideas.
We then composed a diary entry describing a dive round the coral.
2nd piece of writing: Instructions. We went through the introduction of the game which they quite enjoyed (particulalry when choosing our character) to the point when our character made a dive. We discussed what you needed to do to go diving. As we chatted through, I asked the children to start a list of instructions when they felt ready.
How the children responded to using the Wii.
This is a piece of unaided writing from a SEN child (S.A+) who is at level 1c. I was very pleased with her can-do attitude, the use of the bullet points and attempt at listing the instructions. This is twice as much as she would usually write with support!
This piece of writing is by a child who is level 1a, but is often anxious of what to do, and needs support in organising her writing, although otherwise is confident in her work. I am pleased that she wrote without any support and that she fulfilled most of the success criteria (even though her sentences finish on the left margin!).
Overall, the children who seemed to have really benefitted from the use of the Wii on this occasion are the 'support' children , and the SEN children, because they wrote avidly with no support and appeared to achieve more of the success criteria than I expected them to. One child on the SEN register with S&L difficulties, who up to that point had only written about her family and her pets, no matter what the genre was and what was used to inspire writing, wrote about what she saw on the Wii! This was a big step for her. Children did not worry about spellings or which sounds to use.
The whole class wrote enthusiastically, before I asked them to.
Who did not benefit: I was surprised when the Wii did not inspire a child with EBD. He simply did not see having a go as a reward for writing either.
