Writing with Portals.

As I earlier explained, in year 6 we have been using the game Portal and Portal 2 as a stimulus for some creative writing. The focus was on using vocabulary to build an atmosphere.

We began the project by exploring the opening level from the original game. The narrative is almost absent, as we (the players) are plunged into a mysterious laboratory with only an occasional disembodied voice for company.

The children were all gripped and we did a vocabulary harvest, concentrating on feelings and specific, descriptions of the  stark, clinical environment.

The only real challenge was explaining the concept of the 'portals' around which the game's central mechanic revolves. Put simply, you have a device that can place 'holes' on most surfaces, in through one and out through the other. 
For children who were familiar with this game - about a third of the class - it was fine, for the others we had to allow a 20 minute session one afternoon to play through a few levels and understand it.

The next day we explored theories as to why our character was here, where exactly 'here' was and who would be behind it. Theories were impressive and tremendously detailed - the children had been thinking about this! 

We played a few narration games, with a child reading their opening paragraph, and another walking through the environment to match. The discussions that followed these lead to a good breakthrough with a few less confident writers on the importance of extending description, taking the time to do so and the power of well chosen vocabulary - Hurrah!

I felt really happy with the progress in narrative description and vocabulary choices. The blank canvas of the game world was a perfect opportunity to provide a wealth of stimuli for the class. The 'narrator game' was an excellent way of starting a discussion on descriptive writing, and the children were able to literally show the details they enjoyed, or felt should be added to.

This from one of my foundation group:

 This from the standard group - a writer who previously had struggled with not moving her writing forward at 100 mph!

 As a reward, the children are designing their own puzzle levels in the Portal 2 Education edition game. Details on how to participate in this educational beta test can be found here.

 The cross curricular links for this physics-based puzzle game are huge. I am really looking forward to the next few weeks...

Using Wii Party and Mario Kart to teach Time

Teaching Time is notoriously difficult and can be full of misconceptions and confusion, therefore I decided to take a more practical approach when revising Time with my lower set Year 3 maths class this summer term.

I have found many children are unaware of time passing and how long different activities or daily events last. A recent example of this was displayed after a school trip to the Colchester Zoo where the children were adamant the coach journey took 4 hours on the coach when writing their recounts!

So when it came to planning for this term’s Time lessons I took the decision to use the Wii during the starter and input of each lesson. I began by playing a game from Wii Party called Stop Watchers, which is one of the many mini games available. The aim of the game is to estimate when you think the right amount of time has passed. The amount of time is displayed initially and then hidden from view, so the children are encouraged to think and count carefully to ensure they are the most accurate competitor and press the button when they believe that the correct amount of time has passed.

During the game the children without the controllers raised their hands when they thought the time was up and were engaged throughout even though they were not holding a controller. It was interesting to watch children who were unsure and would click the button when other children raised their hand or when the person next to them had pressed the button. However, they soon realised the other children had misjudged the time so learnt to count carefully for themselves to guarantee a more accurate time. After this I used a stop watch to time one minute and the children sat down when they thought a minute had passed. Their judgements became more accurate after each game.

We played other games such as Chin Up Champ to see how many chin ups could be completed in 10 seconds and Jangle Wranglers where they have to ring a bell to round up as many sheep as they can in 30 seconds. After the challenge was complete I asked questions such as ‘Who completed the most chin ups in 10 seconds?’, ‘Who completed the least chin ups in 10 seconds?’, ‘How many more chin ups did player 3 score than player 1?’ This led on to practical activities around the classroom which challenged the children to follow their own line of enquiry for ‘How many.... can you do in 60 seconds?’ Some children chose star jumps, ball in a target and other practical activities. This enabled the children to gain a sense of time passing and what can be achieved or completed within the time.

During another starter and input, I also used Mario Kart where the children raced one another in their best time possible. As a class we analysed the final lap times which needed to be heavily guided for the first couple of turns. Using the Time Trials option we discussed the time differences between the competitors and I asked questions such as ‘How much faster did player 2 have to be to have beaten player 1?’ The children could soon solve calculations between the different lap times of the competitors using Counting On.

Using the Wii was a great way to engage children and to present Time in a practical context. 

Introducing posters to Year R/1 and using Word.

After almost an academic year of teaching with the Wii just with the more able YR children and the Year 1s I decided to include all of the children in this one.

I wanted to teach the children the idea of having 'what', 'where', 'when' in their writing. I also wanted to develop their ICT skills and a poster seemed a simple way of doing this. I chose Mariokart as the game because of its appeal to the boys.

In two lessons we did the following:
1) Looked at posters advertising local speedway events, established what a poster did, and discovered that they told us what/when/where (and how much) about the event.
2) Played a few games on a couple of different tracks.
3) Decided on some ideas for our own posters for advertising a Mariokart event using the prompts what/where/when and how much (children know how to write the numerical date hence its use).
4) As a whole class we used their ideas to produce a poster in pairs or individually using Word (where the ILO was to use font size and type) - I centred the text for them. They then drew the images.

What were the benefits of using the Wii? Apart from the excitement the Wii produced, the encouragement for each other, and the laughs, the children easily came up with ideas for thier poster; we must have spent no longer than a minute! That's how I find the Wii - very good at giving the children ideas and a point of reference.

Next step: to write a recount about attending the event.

Audience and Purpose

I can consider audience and purpose

Continuing with this project we decided to look at game blurbs. We read a few:

Mario Kart Wii
Grab the wheel and enter a new kind of race.

Wii Sports Resort
Enjoy 12 different sports on a tropical island.


Fragile Dreams
Seto may be the only human alive. He buried his grandfather at the end of the summer. Desperately lonely, he decides to search for other survivors on this ruined and dying planet. But he will have to fight off the demons and ghosts that haunt this forsaken and crumbling world while trying to piece together the mystery of mankind's disappearance.

We preferred the writing used in the blurb for Fragile Dreams and decided we could do better for the other two games.

Suspense Writing

Fragile Dreams is a fascinating game. In places it is quite frightening and I would personally limit it to Year 6 or older.

We spent a whole lesson playing the game and collecting powerful descriptive vocabulary.
I decided to focus the writing on the 'show not tell' technique advocated by Pie Corbett. Here the author shows the reader something tense is happening and that the character is scared without telling them the details.

For example, rather than:

A salivating monster pounced from behind the bushes. He was scared.

We might write:

A shadow fell. Leaves began to tremble. A shriek pierced the night sky. He froze. A tight feeling formed in the pit of his stomach.

Whilst walking through the game, the children were able to see lots of shadows or flickering lights and hear eerie noises before any of the events happened so we used this to support our suspense writing.

Commentaries using Mario Kart

I can consider audience and purpose

In preparation for the Year 6 SATs we had done a great deal of work on formal writing. I decided to take a different approach.

We used Mario Kart Wii as a basis for writing commentaries. We listened to lots first and identified that many of the sentences are incomplete or short. We also discovered that lots of facts and background information is given about the racers or football players using technical language.

The lovely thing about this project was it gave some of the children who are less able in writing a chance to shine as they had the 'patter'.

Wild Earth African Safari

Tried and Tested

It was time to use Wild Earth African Safari to help with writing information texts. This was a game I used very successfully last year and it links nicely with the science unit Interdependence and Adaptation so ticks lots of boxes.

As before we walked through the game collecting as much information as possible. Once the children were excited and engaged we turned the game of and completed a shared writing lesson to create an effective opening paragraph. Next my attention turned to paragraphing and organisation  of content. In the next few lessons we thought of different ways to open paragraphs and end them by using devices such as rhetorical questions and comments to the reader.

On the next outing of the game we thought about grouping the information we learnt in order to organise our paragraphs effectively.

From then on all game play was interspersed with writing lessons until we arrived at the ending of our texts.

Writing non-fiction booklets with Year R/ Year 1

We had an 'Under the Sea' topic, and I wanted to do a longer piece of writing with my more able Year R/less able Year 1's.  I chose to do non-fiction books about some fish seen on Endless Ocean. We played the game and took notes about the fish we selected. I supported the children with the reading, and they wrote three of four words on each fish to keep as notes.
In the next few lessons we wrote the notes up as sentences, with lots off verbal work to help them with their sentence construction, although they became more confident as we went along. They had phonememe and word mats to support them. I provided the photos, paper, booklets, which they loved.
We had already done a lot of work as a whole class about the features of non-fiction books including contents and blurb so they were familiar with the text type before we started.

 Year 1 child

 Year 1 child with some difficulty in writing; this book motivated them to write more than they had ever done!

YR child wrote these sentences independently using her phonics.

Overall I found the children were eager to write, gave a lot more in terms of quantity and were very proud of their books.

Mario Kart with year 5 (linked to ww2 topic)

Mario Kart with year 5

We used Mario Kart as a tool to inspire creative writing and to improve the quality of content in the children's writing. This project was also used to develop group discussion and interaction and speaking and listening skills.We began by playing mario kart and making notes on the different settings. Children wrote a simple mind map with ideas for each race. We then chose simple nouns from the settings, e.g. 'cows' and created more detailed descriptions based on a particular race and setting the children chose, e.g. 'In this wonder of a barnyard, where milking cows is what we do best, grassy fields and beautiful flowers surround us in the land of Moo Moo Meadows'.

We displayed these short descriptions around the classroom to provide children with ideas for further writing. Once we had shared the descriptions and made improvements to our own and peers, it was our chance to design our own Mario Kart Race. We had been studying world war two for the term and the children had learnt a lot and were so interested in the topic. We had created role play areas, produced some writing based on 'The Blitz' and made Air Raid shelters for our DT project. We also visited Duxford Air Museum and dressed up as evacuees. Therefore, the children had lots of ideas and were very eager to begin this project. We had another look at Mario Kart to analyse the tracks and obstacles along the way and the children wrote down a list of things they would like to include in their own race. We talked about alliteration and word play and how we would include the Mario characters within our race, e.g. Bowser's Blitz, Peach's Ration Zone, Luigi's Evacuation Station, Toad's Aircraft.  

Once we had discussed these things, the children worked with a mixed ability partner to design their track. They drew and labelled their tracks and included word play and alliteration. Once the designs had been made, they decided on a character to race and what their kart would be like.

The next stage was to create a short presentation to the class of their race. They children had to talk the class through their race in an interesting way, describe the obstacles and show how the race is completed. Once the presentations were completed, the children swapped races and wrote reports on each other's stating the good points and possible points for improvement.

Because it was linked to a topic much enjoyed by the children, they were very inspired with lots of ideas and this supported them during the designing process and ultimately the presentation.

Endless Ocean with Year 1

I used this firm favourite with my group of lower ability Year 1s to write a short story about a day they went diving in the coral. We planned a beginning, middle and end, using the Wii to discuss how our dive would start, what we would do in the dive (or see) and how we would end the dive. This was the first time they had used this game, as a part of our ocean topic.   

This is by my reluctant writer. He finds the Wii motivating, I'll leave it on while he writes so he can refer to it.

This writer started to extend her sentences during this piece of writing, so much she saw!

This child finds writing difficult but was positive about this piece of work, wanting to write about all she saw in the game.

This writer has added in the description I was looking for. The wii gave her lots of ideas but she has added in her own (the crab).

Once again, I have found the Wii particulalry helps the children who find writing difficult to put pencil to paper.

Jumping forwards. And backwards.

This post will be about my plans to incorporate gaming stimuli in the near future. Our school IT infrastructure is going through a major upgrade, hopefully resulting in a stable and capable network. Woohoo!

At the turn of the year I applied, and got into a trial run by Valve software .

They are rolling out a pilot program that was started in the USA last year, involving their multi award winning game Portal 2

 

 learning with Portals has a fair science, creative thinking and mathematical focus, however, there have been some fascinating projects run through it, using the game as a starting canvas for narrative writing.

The educational package delivers the game, and a full level creator/editor (all for free)
The game itself offers a limited narrative, and simply exposes the user to a first-person perspective environment, with a series of open ended challenges. All of which have to be solved by creating Portals - in through blue: out through orange. The player character is confined to a mysterious laboratory environment.

Teachers from across the pond have been designing simple introductory levels, deliberately blank to stimulate children in to inventing their own plot, and characters. 
The game does require a semi decent i3 or i5 processor, and fortunately a few of our newer desktops in the ICT suite are capable of running it. It is worth noting the original Portal game runs fine on my not-so-decent dual core laptop.

As out infrastructure solidifies, I shall share the planning and progress through this project. The game itself is well known, and I shall have to work to strip the game narrative from a few children's minds - but that is no different than the way many of us have been approaching games through the Wii project.

Endless Ocean with Year 6

My colleague has thought about borrowing the Wii for a while now, and this week she did,  to help chidlren write an encylopedic page about coral reef, for a part of their Oceans topic.

First in a Geography lesson the children wrote notes about the different plants and fish (you press A when pointing to a feature and you are given facts). My colleague said this was so successful they continued longer than she planned.
This Year 6 is the class I had in Year 4, so they were used to the Wii, but she commented on how well they shared the console, and supported those not used to using it.
In their English lesson that followed the children wrote up their notes, having to think about features of the genre and sentence structure.
These are photos of their work they acheived in the two lessons.

 

My colleague was impressed with the motivation of the children and how much work was achieved in the 2 lessons. Everyone was writing all the time, she said.

African Safari with Year 1/more able Year R

A firm favourite now, I had this game in the Wii console throughout my half term topic on Dinosaurs. I found I popped it on quickly to look at the landscape and how to walk through 'Dinosaur Land' safely.
The children wrote:

1. Orders of how to stay away from the animals (dinosaurs). If you approach the giraffes at the beginning of the game they become agitated. Children came up with orders such as 'do not touch', 'stay away', do not feed', walk quietly' etc. That was a quick but productive lesson, with children noting orders on whiteboards.
2. Description of a dinosaur landscape: Building upon previous work with the Wii on adjectives, the children wrote a description of a walk through the dinosaur landscape. Their first task was to think of several adjectives to describe various features, including landscapes they had seen in books. This led to a piece of description about what they saw on a walk through the landscape eg. I saw a fast river. I walked past the grey rock.  

Advantages of using the Wii? It added a sense of realism to a History topic that is often taught with plenty of books and cartoons to get a sense of what it was like. The children knew it wasn't dinosaur land, but got a sense of how exciting it would be if it was. My reluctant writer was not reluctant during these sessions. All chidlren wrote regardless of ability (I have the less able Year 1s).

Nintendo DS

Just a thought!

At our last PD day after the Christmas break, our cluster decided to hold a series of workshops with a focus on ICT. I was asked to work with a teacher from another school running a workshop entitled Widening the World of Nintendo.

During this workshop I spoke about the ways in which I have used different games to assist with the teaching of writing. It was well received and people were interested in using something pertinent to children's lives as a stimulus for their learning.

The teacher sharing the workshop with me was discussing the way she uses the Nintendo DS to assist with learning so I thought I would share it.

She uses the consoles for 15 minutes every day as a maths intervention. The intervention starts in the third term of Year 5 and continues into Year 6 for 2 terms. The children use the Maths Training game. The teachers at the school feel strongly that once children have a secure understanding and knowledge of number and times tables, the other areas of maths fall into place more easily. They feel that this intervention has helped to improve rapid recall of number facts and, in turn has helped to improve their maths levels.

Evolving use of technology in the classroom. 

Something slightly different as I am going to write about using an iPad. Just before Christmas I chose to write letters to Santa Claus with my Year 6 class. Ordinarily the children are enthused by this type of activity despite no longer being taken in by tales of St Nick. This year, however, my class were particularly scornful and lacking in enthusiasm.

When I set the rules for the letter: asking for three gifts only which must not need any form of electricity to work and asking for a fourth gift which would benefit someone other than themselves and require selfless thought, the resistance to the task grew.

I then pulled out my iPad from my cupboard to show the children a letter I had sent to Santa via my Letters to Santa app and the personal (well almost) response I had receive. Strangely enough, tuts and groans subsided and excited murmers began to bubble.

Once the children knew they would only be able to send their letters if they were of a respectable standard, I received an impressive level of thought and writing!

Endless Ocean - My Old Favourite

Endless Ocean

My old favourite! I used this game in the same way as before because it works well for me. To start the week, I teach discrete word level lessons on figurative language, particularly simile, metaphor and personification. This year I gave the children some pictures of weather to describe using these figurative angugae techniques. As you can imagine the outcome was varying. We spent a lot of time as a class 'stealing', 'borrowing' and 'magpieing' classmate's ideas and sharing examples on the visualiser which we edited and improved as a class.

Finally the children were allowed to enter the Endless Ocean. As always I sacrificed an entire English lesson to play this game - something I am no longer hesitant to do. There were two learning objectives: I can think of examples of figurative language and I can plan a poem into verses. During the game playing the lesson was structured and the children were directed to think about different topics which could be used for verses eg rocks, plants, water movement etc. Any good ideas were shared and myself and my TA gave the children ideas.

Following on from this each lesson had a short amount of shared writing with lots of mixed ability talk partner work to assist the children with writing their own poems. Each group of children also had a small guided writing session for a verse.

In the photographs I have included a couple of examples of writing completed on a different topic after using the Wii. It demonstrates a better use of vocabulary and descriptive language which was definitely assisted by the Wii lessons. Once of the pieces of work featured is by a child who entered Year 6 at a level 1c. Using the Wii as a stimulus certainly assisted him.

A walk in the park. Or Castle. Or forest.

As I have been fortunate enough to have experimented with a variety of game genres, my approach to using games has evolved. Breaking free of the 'confines' of the game, and using not playing, has been central to this project.

During the first term, extending descriptions and sentences became a focus for development with my year 6 class.

The central advantage, for me, that using a digital world has over a piece of film or a picture is freedom. 

Physical freedom: To move, look, look again and change perspective on an environment. Enabling the children to simply walk, gaze at an idle detail, such as a tree or a candle on a wall. These 'experiences' and the control to examine and reexamine are similar to 'real world' observation and experience. Encouraging and developing the class to think with a writer's mind, and to extend the length of description, involved the child being able to imagine and 'see' the written experience in their mind first. The opportunity to have that in 3D computer-generated space proved to extremely valuable.

The rich and varied environmental detail available in modern computer games presents a previously unimaginable resource for exploring and creating new 'worlds' within the context of creative writing.
That leads to the second great freedom afforded by using video games.

Narrative freedom: The ability to adopt , or partially, or totally reject the narrative direction of a game. When used as a tool to inspire narrative, forcing a direction or context has proven to be challenging - particularly among higher ability writers. But there is no need. Within the context of the game, the woodland above leads to story line that takes you to fetch a set of gem stones for a priest. But it could be anywhere, and lead to anything. Using the 3D game engine as a standalone model enables children to patch this wood into and story we are reading or creating. Similarly, the house below provided and ideal environment to explore the internal lighting. What would the atmosphere inside a Tudor house be like? How can we describe walking around inside? Much better than looking at pictures, simply use the game, and walk in!

Looking out of the top floor window, on to the street below at dawn. Hearing your own creaking footsteps, the muffled conversations of passers by and the tweeting of birds led to extended descriptive writing that carried through the children's work. Leading to a happy teacher!

The game used in this instance was - long title alert - The Elder scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was released  in March 2006, when my current class were just 4. It runs perfectly well (surprisingly) on my modest dual core  work laptop, and was bought for a whole £3!

Examples of Children creating their own narrative from a shared experience in a game world:

 A tale of kidnapping and escape.

A story that turned out to be based in a boarding school - told through flashback - a device we used 'Another Code: R to look at.

 

Wild Earth African Safari Year 3 Autumn Term 2012

Having only briefly used the Nintendo Wii for a starter activity in maths I could see, even within that short amount of time, how engaged the children were. Therefore it seemed sensible to pursue the use of the Wii and to give it much more air time. After reading this blog I decided to use Wild Earth African Safari for our upcoming Year 3 literacy unit Non-Chronological reports. The children had already been learning how to make effective notes using books and videos so it seemed logical to use a new, exciting stimulus for the children to apply their newly learnt skills.

The children were instantly engaged when they saw the Wii and couldn’t wait to get started with the lesson. We had the two year 3 classes together (49 students) who all sat with their literacy books ready to make notes. We discussed what they would be making notes and explained that we would be choosing children who are confident using the Wii to control the game whilst the others made notes. The lower ability children were in two groups with a teaching assistant who scribed their ideas into note format. In addition to this the teacher made notes of key vocabulary on a portable whiteboard as they moved through the game.

At appropriate moments we paused the game to give the children time to collect and organise their notes according to their sub-headings. This process continued for two lessons and within that time the children produced at least two pages of notes. The following lessons enabled the children to write their notes into a non-chronological report so we explained that they were using their notes to report of the African Serengeti where the game was set. This set a great context for their learning and they were eager to share the facts they had learnt. We noticed that the children were able to easily connect simple sentences together using a range of connectives because of their detailed notes for example ‘Elephants produced 330 pounds of dung a day however dung beetles would then roll the dung into little balls.’ The children had the added bonus of the visual stimuli which helped them with their pictures, diagrams and captions.

These are some photographs of the children’s note taking while watching the game and the finished reports.

'Night in the Museum 2' with Year 1

I have a mixed Year R/1 class, and most of the Year 1 children I have are still working towards the Early Learning  Goals, and were at level P6-P7 at the beginning of the academic year. Three of the chidlren also lacked confidence with writing or did not like the process of writing. 
I started using the Wii after half term Autumn 2012, during 25 minutes slots of English time a day.Our class topic was Light and Dark, and I chose 'Night in the Museum' to link in.

Activity 1: Poem
The class were working on activites based around witches and wizards. We read a poem 'The Wizard's Pocket' and Year R were working on activites related to a witch's cauldren. The Year Ones were to write a poem about what was in the Night Watchman's magic bag.
After playing the intial stages for a while (wondering around the museum, finding coins, throwing the stick for the dinosaur, and using the torch and chain from the bag) we started to write:

1. Nouns: Objects that could go in the night watchman's magic bag using the game setting for ideas.
2. Adjectives: Words that describe (but not necessarily for the objects chosen, but any objects they saw on the game)
3. Verbs: Using the action in the game, the children thought of different verbs.

Children used whiteboards to record ideas, were encouraged to use phonics, but were also assisted by me.
Finally, in Guided Writing I showed the children how to randomly choose a word from each of the above to create a list of objects, and therefore a poem. The children then chose their words and finally they published them into a poem:



'Big box flying,
Brown torch playing
Gold box throwing'

'Box shiny
Silver gum
Small torch'

 'coin. chain, snack' work from a child who finds writing frustrating and difficult. He was very involved and motivated thoughout the work, and tried far harder to sound out words.

 

 Nouns written by my most able child, who finished the term at level 1C. She has had issues with confidence, often crying when asked to think of what to write, but during this work I could not stop her from writing!

 

 

Activity 2: Instructions
We were looking at prepositions in the whole class teaching, and had read 'Bears in the Night', a story describing the bears journey, full of prepositions.The Year 1s then used the Wii and we described the way the Nightwatchman was moving around/up/over/on/under etc.
Using a list of these prepositions, the children wrote simple instructions of where to go to find the coins in the game eg 'Run up the stairs', 'Jump on to the boxes'. They had already written instructions with 'bossy words' in a previous unit of work.

Activity 3: Story
The children by now were familiar with the museum's layout and had walked past the pictures on the walls upstairs a few times. We stood by each, one was of an Indian plain, another of a Mayan temple in the jungle, and we talked about what would be in those worlds were the nightwatchman to step through and have a look.
I introduced the idea of writing a beginning, a middle and end. I asked the children to think of a middle and an end to a story that started with 'The Nightwatchman ran to the picture'. They came up with many ideas eg. He stepped on to the pyramid/into the jungle/in the sand'. They were using prepositions easily within their work.
Their ideas for the endings ranged from 'He came back' to He was eaten'. They published their work in a story board format clearly representing the beginning, midddle and end, with illustrations above their sentences.