Using Technology and Games to Engage Middle Years Students in Writing

In my last blog I wrote about grade 1 students learning playground games. I discussed how excited the students were to learn the game and how much easier it was for them to engage in writing procedures once we had digital pictures of them playing a game. As I reflected about ten middle years students that I work with, it seemed logical that this might also motivate them to write.

My Learning Studio class is a group of ten students in grades six and seven that struggle with putting the written word on a page. We have used Class Blogmeister and I have had limited success with blogging with these students. Although they seem motivated to blog, they struggle with writing more than a sentence or two. I had been hoping that the blog might encourage them to write both inside and outside of our meeting time and that it might be a way for them to explore a topic more in depth.

Children spend more time in front of a computer screen these days. Our children are less active and this is a concern. Children use technology, but many use the internet for playing games for hours at a time and some even use the internet inappropriately, particularly as they get older. As one of my goals is also to teach appropriate use of technology, I introduced the topic of active living through our class blog. Then we read “Children on the Move” an alphabet book encouraging active, healthy living.

Our next meeting time was spent outside learning to play Hopscotch, Seven Up and Four Square. As the children played we discussed the rules step by step. I was surprised at how much fun grades sixes and sevens were having playing these games. Something I noticed was that there was often misunderstandings about the rules of the game.

About 30% of the students in the Learning Studio are First Nations/Metis students and another 20% are from families whose parents immigrated from Vietnam. We watched video from Galileo, of an elder telling about stampede games that they played during the Calgary Stampede. I asked our Vietnamese students what kinds or games their parents played. I was jolted to the reality that we often don’t take time to get to know our students when he replied that his dad lived in Vietnam when there was a war going on and didn’t play a lot outside because of land mines. He also mentioned that his dad would make some type of explosive from things left behind through fighting and throw it into the water and see all the fish explode into the air. That led me to the realization that I must find out more about games played by children in Vietnam. This students needs to know that such games are not usually part of a child’s experiences and about games that children in Vietnam have played and currently play.

By the end of watching the stampede games and discussions about games that our parents played, we had a list of ten games on the board. Learning the parts of a procedure was the next task at hand. We read a number of procedures (this part of learning a form of writing is called immersing the children in the form). We explicitly discussed the parts of a procedure and I included the parts of the procedure and their purpose with a poster we had read. (You can get parts of a procedure labels, descriptions of parts of a procedure by clicking on the attachment.)

label-description2

procedure-labels

By having these reluctant students play these playground games first, I was able to motivate them to write about the games. I modelled using a graphic organizer and that my purpose for using it to make sure I could get the list of steps in my head. I used both pictures and words to model this and the use of pictures did motivate those that had difficulty getting words on paper to put pictures on their graphic organizer.

Some students picked a game from the board and some chose other games or activities that they are either familiar with or like to do. My big hurrah though is that for the first time these ten kids were engaged in the prewriting stage of the writing process for the entire class.