Simple Playground Games Are Fun For Students and Motivate Students To Write

We all know how much students love gym class. I have two boys and whenever I ask them about school, gym is the first thing they want to talk about. They both love to read, but yet I have to prod to get information from them about language arts or other subject areas.

As an educator, I am always looking for ways to connect subjects across curriculum. I have been a Physical Education teacher but would more so consider myself well versed in the area of literacy. While it seems that there is little connection between literacy and physical education, I am working on a project that uses children’s love of games to motivate them to read and write.

Our system has trained all teachers in the First Steps writing resource. There is a major emphasis on explicitly teaching children to write in various forms of writing across the curriculum. According to the Canadian Paediatric Society, more than half of Canadian children and youth are not active enough for optimal growth and development. Tiffany Crawford of the Ottawa Citizen writes, “Almost all Canadian children are failing when it comes to being physically active — and the trend is getting worse as kids spend six hours a day or more in front of some type of screen.” Dr. June LeDrew wants to make this a health issue and she has encouraged me to think about how the literacy component might fit into this whole idea of children’s health.

My latest project involves small groups of grade 1 students that I see once a week for reading instruction. They have proved to me that teaching how to play games (we often just assume they know how to play them) and explicitly teaching about procedural writing results in being able to write procedural text. Here is what we did.

A favorite game of mine when I was a kid was hopscotch. There was no cost to this game. All we needed was a piece of chalk to draw the board on the sidewalk. I had a board that was given to my boys by their grandmother. I took it to school and you should have seen the excitement as students walked into my room for reading and saw the hopscotch board. “Are we going to play hopscotch,” they eagerly asked. One might feel guilty about using language arts time to play hopscotch, but this was necessary. While some students had some idea about how to play the game, very few knew exactly how to play. As the children played I took digital photos trying to capture the steps of the game.

See part 2 of this post to see what the children did.