Words and Pictures...

Length and quality of descriptive writing has been a challenge that I have approached a number of ways this year.

In order to try to develop both the descriptive quality and narrative length of the children's writing, I used a 'level' from the Portal 2 video game.
As before, we explored the game world and stripped the narrative (not that there is much of one).

We engaged in a vocabulary harvest, allowing children to walk and look around the environment, focusing on anything in particular that grabbed their interest. We collected a variety of words and phrases - with the challenge for the higher ability groups to develop similes, metaphor and other literary devices.

A reluctant boy writer creates a page of detailed notes/story planning in 20 minutes!

We explored mind mapping methods, bullet points and lists, and the children were free to use the method they found most effective.

We shared our results, stole excellent words from each other and discussed the success criteria for constructing a narrative based on the environment we had explored.

The writing was good, and most importantly, the level of detail and description had progressed extremely well. For the writing sessions, we would have the game running on the whiteboard, but this time we simply concentrated on the sound-scape the game was creating, and the children wrote happily with this in the background. Occasionally someone would ask me to 'walk' the character to a different location, to change the sounds. We also discussed the colour pallette of the game, and how the chosen colour range affected the mood and atmosphere. Again, all of this sensory input and exploration fed its way into the writing.

After some productive response partner work, we also look at their writing, its grammar and sentence-level construction. All in all, a highly rewarding and productive week's writing all round!

This has, incidentally, helped engage the children beyond literacy; I am using the game engine and level creator as part of the computing work we are doing, and plan to link instructional and explanation texts with programming and coding.

Using The Romans (Horrible Histories)

I took this game on because it fitted in perfectly with our topic of the term 'The Romans'.

The game is based on a story of a boy who is training to be a gladiator and so there are lots of little games to play and pass, all of which are loosely based upon gladiator skills. There are facts to read about the Roman's gory side of things, and a simple simulation of a colosseum and its gardens, school, and other out-buildings which you can walk around.

The children enjoyed playing the games and learning the facts although, beware, some of them are quite gruesome!
It also provided children with extra knowledge about the Romans, what a colosseum would have looked like, the soldiers, trades, sellers and other members of public that would have been there and the architecture. This proved useful in enhancing their overall historical knowledge and they were able to apply these facts to their writing in Topic and English lessons.
Activities I did were:
Advert for Gladiator training - attracting potential clients to train at the colosseum. Looking at other posters and persuasive writing they produced an advert to persuade new men to join. More work on persuasive language was needed to make this really successful, but they wrote about what they saw on the game and needed no help with content.

Descriptive writing - teaching and using noun-phrases to describe what the colosseum and grounds were like. Good for this, no problem describing what they saw and we could refer back to the game any time to help them with ideas.

Note taking: taking facts about what being a gladiator would have been like that informed a speaking and listening exercise 'Would you be a gladiator?' Using whiteboards, some help with the reading and talking, children quickly picked up on the more gory facts and the training involved.

How I found the game: I did not feel so inspired, or felt that the children were as inspired as they have been with other simulation games. It was quite limited in this way, and some of the games were quite difficult to win and this put some children off having a go, something I have not experienced before. However, they were interested in the facts and it did help them widen their historical knowledge which they applied in other writing tasks during topic. I would use it again.