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.