'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.

KS1 Resources

We are now developing ideas for how to use some of the Wii games to support learning in KS1.  When these are finished they will be placed on the Downloadable Resources page and will be flagged up on the main page as well.

Many thanks to Shotley Primary School and Grange Primary School for this work!

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.

Endless Ocean with Year 1

In Spring this year, I found myself teaching Year 1 ; a big move from Key Stage 2, and Year 4/5 who I used the Wii with the previous year.
In the summer term, I chose to use Endless Ocean, my first and favourite game that I used with the older children.

Teaching
(all objectives had been covered in some way since the Spring term so we were not learning anything brand new. The success criteria for each piece of writing was established before each session)
1st peice of writing: Diary. Children took turns to swim around the coral and the class gave me descriptive words; these words were adjectives to describe the coral and sea bed and fish.  Once they understood what I wanted them to think of, I asked each of them to write down their words on their white boards.
In the following session we wrote adverbs on whiteboards to describe the way the fish moved. A further lesson on looking at an extract of Blue Planet (BBC) gave us further ideas.
We then composed a diary entry describing a dive round the coral.

2nd piece of writing: Instructions. We went through the introduction of the game which they quite enjoyed (particulalry when choosing our character) to the point when our character made a dive.  We discussed what you needed to do to go diving. As we chatted through, I asked the children to start a list of instructions when they felt ready.

How the children responded to using the Wii.

This is a piece of unaided writing from a SEN child (S.A+) who is at level 1c. I was very pleased with her can-do attitude, the use of the bullet points and attempt at listing the instructions. This is twice as much as she would usually write with support!

This piece of writing is by a child who is level 1a, but is often anxious of what to do, and needs support in organising her writing, although otherwise is confident in her work. I am pleased that she wrote without any support and that she fulfilled most of the success criteria (even though her sentences finish on the left margin!).

 

Overall, the children who seemed to have really benefitted from the use of the Wii on this occasion are the 'support' children , and the SEN children, because they wrote avidly with no support and appeared to achieve more of the success criteria than I expected them to. One child on the SEN register with S&L difficulties, who up to that point had only written about her family and her pets, no matter what the genre was and what was used to inspire writing, wrote about what she saw on the Wii!  This was a big step for her. Children did not worry about spellings or which sounds to use.

The whole class wrote enthusiastically, before I asked them to.

 

Who did not benefit: I was surprised when the Wii did not inspire a child with EBD. He simply did not see having a go as a reward for writing either.  

 

 

Back-to-back Flashbacks

Using software effectively has often been a matter of nerve for me. Trial and error is, perhaps, one of the most useful processes - provided you can hold your nerve long enough during the error, and actually keep your head during the trial.

It was during the exploration of flashbacks that automatically thought of revisiting 'Another Code:R'

Beautiful animation and character aside, Another Code is a splendid journey, with flashback interwoven through the story's revelations.

We had been reading a wide range of stories that featured flashbacks, using picture books and telling our own stories - However (and I'm hoping my teaching is not the root cause of this) using a flashback in their writing was proving to be tricky.

I decided to use a sort of 'visual map', and together we ran through the opening cinematic introduction, and then gathered as a group to work out what was happening, when the flashbacks occurred, and how this 'overlapped' with the 'present time'.

We re-ran the introduction and followed our large visual plan (If I was any sort of decent, organised person I'd have taken a picture of this...) and progressed through a portion of the story.

I ran the Wii parallel to talking and writing sessions, and the children would relate their deployment of flashbacks to the use of the device in Another Code. This was very useful, and actually helped a number of children to 'lose the fear' and really show some bravado in their writing. We would 'dip' in and out of the texts and Wii during the process - which was simple, and caused no disruption at all - There is no 'novelty' factor anymore for my year 6, who used the Wii with Clive in year 5, and were keen to look at the game in a different light. They wrote games reviews of Another Code last year, and I am continually impressed at how sophisticated children are with any technology, particularly computer games. Using this game in the same way as we were using extracts from books was an easy transition, and just a matter of flicking over the input selector for the projector.

As we are in our second year, the use of a Wii (or, for that matter, any computer game) is something that still inspires enthusiasm, and now we have totally lost the 'ooooh a Wii!' factor.

The console may be approaching the end of it's life as Nintendo's flagship, however a large library of games remains. Using games of any sort is something this project has opened up to me. Many games are enormous productions with deep and interesting narrative - and characters. There are many reasons why the games industry is bigger than cinema, DVD, MP3 and Books sales combined. Not all 'games' are actually games in the traditional sense. Interactive story telling is really where many of these games are actually at. Their potential to inspire creative writing is equal to any other stimulus. Not a laser-machine gun in sight.

A dodgy memory card is currently preventing me from recovering the pictures I have - I will either win that battle tomorrow, or, well, use a different camera. Pictures of plans and writing to follow...

Toby.

Endless Ocean

Tried and Tested!

I used this game last year to aid with teaching figurative language in poetry, focussing on personification. I decided to use this game again in the same way as it worked so well. In addition to this I had a SCITT student training in my class and I wanted her to see how the Wii could be used as an aid to teaching writing.

She was impressed by the ideas produced in these lessons and even delivered a lesson using the Wii. This was not an easy lesson as she was not familiar with the console herself and was aware that behavioural standards could slip when using a computer game. She had to spend some time playing the game before she taught using it but after that was fine and enjoyed the lesson.

Here are some examples of the writing they produced:

Explanation Texts

Wild Earth African Safari

Initially I had reservations about using this game as I felt the storyline was too large and complex. However, after listening to Toby's feedback from his lessons and looking at some of the writing produced by his class, I decided to use it for my writing on explanation texts. (It did help that Toby spent a short time showing me how to navigate the game as I am not very good with explorations games.)

The first assignment on the game is to take certain photographs and explore the area. During this time the commentators are giving lots of useful and interesting information about the African plains and the plants and animals found there.

The children wrote comprehensive notes and we spent time as a class developing these into decent sentences, working on our school targets. Once the children collected lots of information, discreet teaching on features of explanation texts was completed. In word and sentence level work, particular focus was placed on organising of sentences into paragraphs. (The next step in our school targets.)

All of the children wrote an explanation text using the notes they had collected from the game. I allowed the children to be fairly independent in their organisation (something I was able to do due to using the Wii several times and having confidence in the children with the work they produce). Some children wrote a very tightly focused explanation text on elephants, whereas others wrote about Safety on Safari, or similar.

Despite the independence in focus, the lessons were very tightly monitored and lots of guided reading and writing took place. Therefore, in the second part of this unit I decided to give the children free reigns. They spent time researching a chosen topic and wrote their own explanation text using all of the knowledge they had learnt.

Starters and introductions to lessons focused on the word and sentence level targets and the features of explanation texts still. All of the children were able to transfer their knowledge and were naturally enthused by the subject.