Teaching News

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 10:00 AM PDT

I’ve posted about the wonderful ICT Games site before, but the site has been updated considerably since the previous post. I recently had the pleasure of attending a workshop by James Barrett, the creator of the site, in which he highlighted some of the resources on his site. Here are some of my favourites:

The Wordy Woods - This fantastic tool can be used throughout your Literacy / topic lessons. Different sets of words can be displayed (which may be linked to your current spelling lists, phonics words or topic vocabulary). These are then displayed in the ‘Wordy Woods’ for children to refer to when they are writing. If children would like to see a larger version of each word, they simply drag it to the bottom of the page. The site cleverly remembers your word lists, so you can build up lists of words over a week or a longer period and come back to them. Fabulous!

Premiership Words – James has also created a similar tool to ‘The Wordy Woods’ based on a football theme.

Lunch Register and Behaviour Chart – The daily lunch register lets children drag their names onto their lunch choice for the day, so that teachers can easily see who is having school dinners / packed lunch each day. You can also change the options to ‘I read my book last night’. The names are remembered on your class computer, so you don’t have to type them every day! The accompanying ‘Golden Time Chart’ is a great behaviour management tool for those who use a ‘Golden Time’ reward system in their class.

Help a Hedgehog – This great game challenges individuals, groups and whole classes to read words as quickly as possible. A selection of words are available to choose from, or you can enter your own.

Change Exchanger – In this game, children are taken to a virtual checkout. They have to scan their items, check the price and calculate the amount of change that will be given, using the coins provided. This would be great as a whole class or independent activity in your Maths lessons.

Science Bingo – This is a fantastic starting point for discussing and reviewing Science vocabulary linked to different topics. Children are given a Bingo card (printable from the site) and the game will then choose some of these words for a game of Bingo. As each word is displayed in the game, children can be asked to explain what the words mean and / or put them into a sentence. High Frequency Word Bingo and Number Facts Bingo are also available.