Endless Ocean with Year 6

My colleague has thought about borrowing the Wii for a while now, and this week she did,  to help chidlren write an encylopedic page about coral reef, for a part of their Oceans topic.

First in a Geography lesson the children wrote notes about the different plants and fish (you press A when pointing to a feature and you are given facts). My colleague said this was so successful they continued longer than she planned.
This Year 6 is the class I had in Year 4, so they were used to the Wii, but she commented on how well they shared the console, and supported those not used to using it.
In their English lesson that followed the children wrote up their notes, having to think about features of the genre and sentence structure.
These are photos of their work they acheived in the two lessons.

 

My colleague was impressed with the motivation of the children and how much work was achieved in the 2 lessons. Everyone was writing all the time, she said.

African Safari with Year 1/more able Year R

A firm favourite now, I had this game in the Wii console throughout my half term topic on Dinosaurs. I found I popped it on quickly to look at the landscape and how to walk through 'Dinosaur Land' safely.
The children wrote:

1. Orders of how to stay away from the animals (dinosaurs). If you approach the giraffes at the beginning of the game they become agitated. Children came up with orders such as 'do not touch', 'stay away', do not feed', walk quietly' etc. That was a quick but productive lesson, with children noting orders on whiteboards.
2. Description of a dinosaur landscape: Building upon previous work with the Wii on adjectives, the children wrote a description of a walk through the dinosaur landscape. Their first task was to think of several adjectives to describe various features, including landscapes they had seen in books. This led to a piece of description about what they saw on a walk through the landscape eg. I saw a fast river. I walked past the grey rock.  

Advantages of using the Wii? It added a sense of realism to a History topic that is often taught with plenty of books and cartoons to get a sense of what it was like. The children knew it wasn't dinosaur land, but got a sense of how exciting it would be if it was. My reluctant writer was not reluctant during these sessions. All chidlren wrote regardless of ability (I have the less able Year 1s).

Nintendo DS

Just a thought!

At our last PD day after the Christmas break, our cluster decided to hold a series of workshops with a focus on ICT. I was asked to work with a teacher from another school running a workshop entitled Widening the World of Nintendo.

During this workshop I spoke about the ways in which I have used different games to assist with the teaching of writing. It was well received and people were interested in using something pertinent to children's lives as a stimulus for their learning.

The teacher sharing the workshop with me was discussing the way she uses the Nintendo DS to assist with learning so I thought I would share it.

She uses the consoles for 15 minutes every day as a maths intervention. The intervention starts in the third term of Year 5 and continues into Year 6 for 2 terms. The children use the Maths Training game. The teachers at the school feel strongly that once children have a secure understanding and knowledge of number and times tables, the other areas of maths fall into place more easily. They feel that this intervention has helped to improve rapid recall of number facts and, in turn has helped to improve their maths levels.

Evolving use of technology in the classroom. 

Something slightly different as I am going to write about using an iPad. Just before Christmas I chose to write letters to Santa Claus with my Year 6 class. Ordinarily the children are enthused by this type of activity despite no longer being taken in by tales of St Nick. This year, however, my class were particularly scornful and lacking in enthusiasm.

When I set the rules for the letter: asking for three gifts only which must not need any form of electricity to work and asking for a fourth gift which would benefit someone other than themselves and require selfless thought, the resistance to the task grew.

I then pulled out my iPad from my cupboard to show the children a letter I had sent to Santa via my Letters to Santa app and the personal (well almost) response I had receive. Strangely enough, tuts and groans subsided and excited murmers began to bubble.

Once the children knew they would only be able to send their letters if they were of a respectable standard, I received an impressive level of thought and writing!

Endless Ocean - My Old Favourite

Endless Ocean

My old favourite! I used this game in the same way as before because it works well for me. To start the week, I teach discrete word level lessons on figurative language, particularly simile, metaphor and personification. This year I gave the children some pictures of weather to describe using these figurative angugae techniques. As you can imagine the outcome was varying. We spent a lot of time as a class 'stealing', 'borrowing' and 'magpieing' classmate's ideas and sharing examples on the visualiser which we edited and improved as a class.

Finally the children were allowed to enter the Endless Ocean. As always I sacrificed an entire English lesson to play this game - something I am no longer hesitant to do. There were two learning objectives: I can think of examples of figurative language and I can plan a poem into verses. During the game playing the lesson was structured and the children were directed to think about different topics which could be used for verses eg rocks, plants, water movement etc. Any good ideas were shared and myself and my TA gave the children ideas.

Following on from this each lesson had a short amount of shared writing with lots of mixed ability talk partner work to assist the children with writing their own poems. Each group of children also had a small guided writing session for a verse.

In the photographs I have included a couple of examples of writing completed on a different topic after using the Wii. It demonstrates a better use of vocabulary and descriptive language which was definitely assisted by the Wii lessons. Once of the pieces of work featured is by a child who entered Year 6 at a level 1c. Using the Wii as a stimulus certainly assisted him.

A walk in the park. Or Castle. Or forest.

As I have been fortunate enough to have experimented with a variety of game genres, my approach to using games has evolved. Breaking free of the 'confines' of the game, and using not playing, has been central to this project.

During the first term, extending descriptions and sentences became a focus for development with my year 6 class.

The central advantage, for me, that using a digital world has over a piece of film or a picture is freedom. 

Physical freedom: To move, look, look again and change perspective on an environment. Enabling the children to simply walk, gaze at an idle detail, such as a tree or a candle on a wall. These 'experiences' and the control to examine and reexamine are similar to 'real world' observation and experience. Encouraging and developing the class to think with a writer's mind, and to extend the length of description, involved the child being able to imagine and 'see' the written experience in their mind first. The opportunity to have that in 3D computer-generated space proved to extremely valuable.

The rich and varied environmental detail available in modern computer games presents a previously unimaginable resource for exploring and creating new 'worlds' within the context of creative writing.
That leads to the second great freedom afforded by using video games.

Narrative freedom: The ability to adopt , or partially, or totally reject the narrative direction of a game. When used as a tool to inspire narrative, forcing a direction or context has proven to be challenging - particularly among higher ability writers. But there is no need. Within the context of the game, the woodland above leads to story line that takes you to fetch a set of gem stones for a priest. But it could be anywhere, and lead to anything. Using the 3D game engine as a standalone model enables children to patch this wood into and story we are reading or creating. Similarly, the house below provided and ideal environment to explore the internal lighting. What would the atmosphere inside a Tudor house be like? How can we describe walking around inside? Much better than looking at pictures, simply use the game, and walk in!

Looking out of the top floor window, on to the street below at dawn. Hearing your own creaking footsteps, the muffled conversations of passers by and the tweeting of birds led to extended descriptive writing that carried through the children's work. Leading to a happy teacher!

The game used in this instance was - long title alert - The Elder scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was released  in March 2006, when my current class were just 4. It runs perfectly well (surprisingly) on my modest dual core  work laptop, and was bought for a whole £3!

Examples of Children creating their own narrative from a shared experience in a game world:

 A tale of kidnapping and escape.

A story that turned out to be based in a boarding school - told through flashback - a device we used 'Another Code: R to look at.

 

Wild Earth African Safari Year 3 Autumn Term 2012

Having only briefly used the Nintendo Wii for a starter activity in maths I could see, even within that short amount of time, how engaged the children were. Therefore it seemed sensible to pursue the use of the Wii and to give it much more air time. After reading this blog I decided to use Wild Earth African Safari for our upcoming Year 3 literacy unit Non-Chronological reports. The children had already been learning how to make effective notes using books and videos so it seemed logical to use a new, exciting stimulus for the children to apply their newly learnt skills.

The children were instantly engaged when they saw the Wii and couldn’t wait to get started with the lesson. We had the two year 3 classes together (49 students) who all sat with their literacy books ready to make notes. We discussed what they would be making notes and explained that we would be choosing children who are confident using the Wii to control the game whilst the others made notes. The lower ability children were in two groups with a teaching assistant who scribed their ideas into note format. In addition to this the teacher made notes of key vocabulary on a portable whiteboard as they moved through the game.

At appropriate moments we paused the game to give the children time to collect and organise their notes according to their sub-headings. This process continued for two lessons and within that time the children produced at least two pages of notes. The following lessons enabled the children to write their notes into a non-chronological report so we explained that they were using their notes to report of the African Serengeti where the game was set. This set a great context for their learning and they were eager to share the facts they had learnt. We noticed that the children were able to easily connect simple sentences together using a range of connectives because of their detailed notes for example ‘Elephants produced 330 pounds of dung a day however dung beetles would then roll the dung into little balls.’ The children had the added bonus of the visual stimuli which helped them with their pictures, diagrams and captions.

These are some photographs of the children’s note taking while watching the game and the finished reports.