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.