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.

Fragile Dreams

Year 6 Summer Term

Definitely the most adventurous way I have used the Wii within the classroom to date. I showed the children the box and the blurb before placing them into mixed ability groups. I then asked the children to consider all of the types of writing they had completed in Year 6 and to plan some units for the following lessons.

I was surprised with the amount of ideas produced by the children. Beyond the basic vocabulary and description work, the children suggested we use the game to write diary entries, suspense writing, character creation of ghosts and ghouls and newspaper articles. One child even suggested we link our English to PSHE and think about relationships and loss of loved ones.

I kept all of the ideas created by the children and each few days I asked them to decide which they wanted to do. For each new topic we had a session in which the children created their own success criteria. Then we based our next few lessons around the game.

The biggest reward from this was having the opportunity to observe quite how much the children had learnt over the course of the year and to see their level of maturity.