I am rapidly expanding my suite of subject related shockwave flash games.
The bread and butter of the 'work' we are doing at present in English centers around Mr Anker's tests, which focus on Californian State Standards and Common Core. (USA). These are a little dry, although the students still stay on task with them.
I have noticed that the students perform much more strongly when they are given choice of what to do - this goes against my natural instincts - but every now and again, I have a lesson, or a section of a lesson, where I allow the students to self select their activites. They gravitate more to the maths games than the language based ones, so today I placed a restriction: any game, but it had to be in the 'English' folder. Moans and complaints........What, can't we play 'go-gopher'? (A co-ordinate hunting game that the kids are currently fanatical about).
The students at first gravitated to the stories I have in SWF - I only have a small selection of these animated stories - and after that, moved on to more inter-active games - one team of two started to play 'homophone football", and the other a similar language based shoot-out game with a football theme. After each question, they receive immediate feedback, and then the chance to kick a ball at a goal.
I am amazed that they never tire of this game....if I were giving a pen and paper exercise with the same learning materials, they would soon start another game, called 'throw the eraser', or another called 'I lost my pen', or 'I really need to visit the lavatory', or another game I call 'stalled on the runway'.....or "hey my keyring is suddenly really interesting! lets look at it!" Or just start chatting to a neighbour.
(My classroom is social, but most of the conversations relate to the work being done - "How do I do this?" "Help me with that, I'm stuck!" Instead of one teacher in the room, I suddenly have a classroom full of teachers. It is wonderful to behold. There is very little task-avoidance conversation. )
These boys would certainly not spend an entire lesson doing paper based grammar exercises without some rather intensive and unpleasant (from my side of the fence, and theirs) intervention to keep them on task.
These days, I seldom get requests to leave the room for the lavatory, and when a kid goes, they fly out the door, and come charging back to class really fast.
As I said in a previous post, most of my classroom management problems these days, since I started introducing learning games, centre around getting the kids to leave the room for a following lesson or break time.
The bread and butter of the 'work' we are doing at present in English centers around Mr Anker's tests, which focus on Californian State Standards and Common Core. (USA). These are a little dry, although the students still stay on task with them.
I have noticed that the students perform much more strongly when they are given choice of what to do - this goes against my natural instincts - but every now and again, I have a lesson, or a section of a lesson, where I allow the students to self select their activites. They gravitate more to the maths games than the language based ones, so today I placed a restriction: any game, but it had to be in the 'English' folder. Moans and complaints........What, can't we play 'go-gopher'? (A co-ordinate hunting game that the kids are currently fanatical about).
The students at first gravitated to the stories I have in SWF - I only have a small selection of these animated stories - and after that, moved on to more inter-active games - one team of two started to play 'homophone football", and the other a similar language based shoot-out game with a football theme. After each question, they receive immediate feedback, and then the chance to kick a ball at a goal.
I am amazed that they never tire of this game....if I were giving a pen and paper exercise with the same learning materials, they would soon start another game, called 'throw the eraser', or another called 'I lost my pen', or 'I really need to visit the lavatory', or another game I call 'stalled on the runway'.....or "hey my keyring is suddenly really interesting! lets look at it!" Or just start chatting to a neighbour.
(My classroom is social, but most of the conversations relate to the work being done - "How do I do this?" "Help me with that, I'm stuck!" Instead of one teacher in the room, I suddenly have a classroom full of teachers. It is wonderful to behold. There is very little task-avoidance conversation. )
These boys would certainly not spend an entire lesson doing paper based grammar exercises without some rather intensive and unpleasant (from my side of the fence, and theirs) intervention to keep them on task.
These days, I seldom get requests to leave the room for the lavatory, and when a kid goes, they fly out the door, and come charging back to class really fast.
As I said in a previous post, most of my classroom management problems these days, since I started introducing learning games, centre around getting the kids to leave the room for a following lesson or break time.
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