Please don’t take my Wii away

To give the children a focus for further developing their persuasive writing skills I posted on the IWB a note which said that the head did not think using the Wii in class was a good idea and that it served very little purpose and did not provide opportunities to exercise.

All would have been fine if either 1) I had shared what I was planning with the head or 2) she had not decided to visit the class that session!

What was planned as a writing activity became a Speaking and Listening one instead and quite heavy on the Speaking side.

The poor head had no idea why she was bombarded with every argument under the sun on why the Wii was an excellent project to use in the class and how it provided not only exercise but opportunities for the children to develop their socializing skills.

I am glad that we had spent some time in a previous lesson really focussing on the need to be polite whilst trying to persuade someone to our way of thinking!

An Important Visitor

Earlier this week the creator of the Wii project, who is  the adviser for E-Learning in the Borough, came to visit the class and was very impressed with the work that she saw the children had done. Unfortunately the visitor from the Institute of Education was unable to visit on that day but may come in another time.

She is going to one of the speakers at Games Based Learning and asked if she could show some of the work we have done in class ;o) WOO HOO!!!

One of the other things we found out was that the project has gained the 2012 Olympics inspired mark which is great news!

The children enjoyed sharing the work they had done  and showed off their table tennis skills on both the real table as well as on the Wii. They were able to talk confidently about what they had been doing which can be a very difficult skill for EBD children. Often children with very poor self-esteem find it unsettling to be complimented…. sad but true.

We have been busy…

Over the past month things have been moving on with the Wii Literacy work.

On the 8th February the support organiser for the Wii-limpics Project came back and with her help the children researched various exercises and stretches for the ‘trainer’ role. We videod and photographed the exercises and these will be added to a PhotoStory soon.

The following week (12th February) we focussed on revising instructional text and the need for sentences to be clear and precise.

The children picked up quickly that each step began with a sequence word (first, next, then, after that and finally) or an imperative (bossy) verb (mix, cut, stir, chop).

What is nice to see is that they are showing a far better knowledge of the various non-fiction types than they did at the beginning. Hurrah!!!

We researched the five food groups and combined a variety of foods to create a nutritious and healthy menu that our athlete might eat.

It is great, that at our school we have a good sized kitchen for the children to practice cooking and hygiene which is such an important life skill.

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Every Friday we spend a lesson practising and playing Table Tennis both on the Wii and in ‘real’ life. We are enjoying taking turns, practicing and improving our skills and learning the rules of Table Tennis.

We are going to start graphing the results of each child to see their individual improvement as well as making it easier to choose the ‘athlete’ we will put forward for the final competition.

This week we have been focusing on Report Writing and the structure they need to follow for this text type. We have used the non-fiction writing frames provided by the fab Bev Evans on her site Communication 4 All.

These PowerPoint templates give the children an excellent structure for their writing.

Some of the children have chosen to use Comic Life to create their information page. This is another greatly motivating piece of software which is very popular with my class of EBD boys. They love how easy it is to quickly produce a high quality looking comic.

The plan is for the children to each write a page of text for an information book which they will create using  2Create a Super Story from 2Simple.

The class’ audience will be the rest of the children throughout the school and this will also be a good way to show off this new piece of software we purchased after 2Simple so kindly let me sample after BETT2010.

Tomorrow is an exciting day as we are having two important visitors come to see the children working on the project and asking them questions. I am sure they will be quite impressed with the work the children have done as I certainly am.