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.

Commentaries using Mario Kart

I can consider audience and purpose

In preparation for the Year 6 SATs we had done a great deal of work on formal writing. I decided to take a different approach.

We used Mario Kart Wii as a basis for writing commentaries. We listened to lots first and identified that many of the sentences are incomplete or short. We also discovered that lots of facts and background information is given about the racers or football players using technical language.

The lovely thing about this project was it gave some of the children who are less able in writing a chance to shine as they had the 'patter'.

Wild Earth African Safari

Tried and Tested

It was time to use Wild Earth African Safari to help with writing information texts. This was a game I used very successfully last year and it links nicely with the science unit Interdependence and Adaptation so ticks lots of boxes.

As before we walked through the game collecting as much information as possible. Once the children were excited and engaged we turned the game of and completed a shared writing lesson to create an effective opening paragraph. Next my attention turned to paragraphing and organisation  of content. In the next few lessons we thought of different ways to open paragraphs and end them by using devices such as rhetorical questions and comments to the reader.

On the next outing of the game we thought about grouping the information we learnt in order to organise our paragraphs effectively.

From then on all game play was interspersed with writing lessons until we arrived at the ending of our texts.

Writing non-fiction booklets with Year R/ Year 1

We had an 'Under the Sea' topic, and I wanted to do a longer piece of writing with my more able Year R/less able Year 1's.  I chose to do non-fiction books about some fish seen on Endless Ocean. We played the game and took notes about the fish we selected. I supported the children with the reading, and they wrote three of four words on each fish to keep as notes.
In the next few lessons we wrote the notes up as sentences, with lots off verbal work to help them with their sentence construction, although they became more confident as we went along. They had phonememe and word mats to support them. I provided the photos, paper, booklets, which they loved.
We had already done a lot of work as a whole class about the features of non-fiction books including contents and blurb so they were familiar with the text type before we started.

 Year 1 child

 Year 1 child with some difficulty in writing; this book motivated them to write more than they had ever done!

YR child wrote these sentences independently using her phonics.

Overall I found the children were eager to write, gave a lot more in terms of quantity and were very proud of their books.

Mario Kart with year 5 (linked to ww2 topic)

Mario Kart with year 5

We used Mario Kart as a tool to inspire creative writing and to improve the quality of content in the children's writing. This project was also used to develop group discussion and interaction and speaking and listening skills.We began by playing mario kart and making notes on the different settings. Children wrote a simple mind map with ideas for each race. We then chose simple nouns from the settings, e.g. 'cows' and created more detailed descriptions based on a particular race and setting the children chose, e.g. 'In this wonder of a barnyard, where milking cows is what we do best, grassy fields and beautiful flowers surround us in the land of Moo Moo Meadows'.

We displayed these short descriptions around the classroom to provide children with ideas for further writing. Once we had shared the descriptions and made improvements to our own and peers, it was our chance to design our own Mario Kart Race. We had been studying world war two for the term and the children had learnt a lot and were so interested in the topic. We had created role play areas, produced some writing based on 'The Blitz' and made Air Raid shelters for our DT project. We also visited Duxford Air Museum and dressed up as evacuees. Therefore, the children had lots of ideas and were very eager to begin this project. We had another look at Mario Kart to analyse the tracks and obstacles along the way and the children wrote down a list of things they would like to include in their own race. We talked about alliteration and word play and how we would include the Mario characters within our race, e.g. Bowser's Blitz, Peach's Ration Zone, Luigi's Evacuation Station, Toad's Aircraft.  

Once we had discussed these things, the children worked with a mixed ability partner to design their track. They drew and labelled their tracks and included word play and alliteration. Once the designs had been made, they decided on a character to race and what their kart would be like.

The next stage was to create a short presentation to the class of their race. They children had to talk the class through their race in an interesting way, describe the obstacles and show how the race is completed. Once the presentations were completed, the children swapped races and wrote reports on each other's stating the good points and possible points for improvement.

Because it was linked to a topic much enjoyed by the children, they were very inspired with lots of ideas and this supported them during the designing process and ultimately the presentation.

Endless Ocean with Year 1

I used this firm favourite with my group of lower ability Year 1s to write a short story about a day they went diving in the coral. We planned a beginning, middle and end, using the Wii to discuss how our dive would start, what we would do in the dive (or see) and how we would end the dive. This was the first time they had used this game, as a part of our ocean topic.   

This is by my reluctant writer. He finds the Wii motivating, I'll leave it on while he writes so he can refer to it.

This writer started to extend her sentences during this piece of writing, so much she saw!

This child finds writing difficult but was positive about this piece of work, wanting to write about all she saw in the game.

This writer has added in the description I was looking for. The wii gave her lots of ideas but she has added in her own (the crab).

Once again, I have found the Wii particulalry helps the children who find writing difficult to put pencil to paper.

Jumping forwards. And backwards.

This post will be about my plans to incorporate gaming stimuli in the near future. Our school IT infrastructure is going through a major upgrade, hopefully resulting in a stable and capable network. Woohoo!

At the turn of the year I applied, and got into a trial run by Valve software .

They are rolling out a pilot program that was started in the USA last year, involving their multi award winning game Portal 2

 

 learning with Portals has a fair science, creative thinking and mathematical focus, however, there have been some fascinating projects run through it, using the game as a starting canvas for narrative writing.

The educational package delivers the game, and a full level creator/editor (all for free)
The game itself offers a limited narrative, and simply exposes the user to a first-person perspective environment, with a series of open ended challenges. All of which have to be solved by creating Portals - in through blue: out through orange. The player character is confined to a mysterious laboratory environment.

Teachers from across the pond have been designing simple introductory levels, deliberately blank to stimulate children in to inventing their own plot, and characters. 
The game does require a semi decent i3 or i5 processor, and fortunately a few of our newer desktops in the ICT suite are capable of running it. It is worth noting the original Portal game runs fine on my not-so-decent dual core laptop.

As out infrastructure solidifies, I shall share the planning and progress through this project. The game itself is well known, and I shall have to work to strip the game narrative from a few children's minds - but that is no different than the way many of us have been approaching games through the Wii project.