I love it when children are so engaged with a learning experience that they play it several times. Each replay game means that they are strengthening their skills. This week I observed several kid-approved learning experiences.

Kid-approved Literacy Game

My learners are working on letter sounds. I modified a matching game and added a letter sound element to it. In order to select a card, the child had to first identify the letter sound. If they were lucky they would uncover a matching character card. This was often followed by a loud “YES”! One doesn’t often hear “let’s play it again” when it comes to a learning task but this learning experience had many such requests.

Kid-approved Numeracy Game

I shared these two games on a previous post. Since the are often requested by the children, I thought I would share them again.

1 2 3 Treasure Box

Just like you, I have a range of learners that I am supporting. I have some are still working on understanding what does 1 and 2 mean and others who are confidently subitizing up to six. Student engagement is higher with hands-on activities.  I first played the games with the children needing additional support and practice, and before you knew it, they were teaching the other children how to play.

Using playing cards, I pulled out the A, 2, 3 and each player turned a card and then added that many cubes into their dish. Once the treasure box is empty, the cubes are linked into a train to see which train is longest. We did a comparison instead of counting, as the original group of children I was supporting were not successfully counting past three. I did edit the A card and added a number 1 to it. This game turned out to be extremely popular – I think it was the fact that the cubes were in a treasure box, and they loved the comparison at the end of the game!

Tenzi

I came across this game at a workshop. It is a highly requested game in the classroom. I did modify the game this year by having the children roll their dice into a basket – previous years, I had them rolling on the floor and desk and yes, there were dice rolling everywhere. First, I present six numbers and ask the child to select their lucky number – we then roll the ten dice and look to see if their lucky number was there – if yes, we placed it on the 10-frame mat. Play continues until all the frames are full and then the child says “tenzi.”  This game gives the children practice in quickly looking for their number but also practice in recognizing the dice patter dots for numbers 1 to 6.

Do you have any kid-approved learning experiences? If yes, please share!

Happy Learning,

Lynda