FUN BRAIN
Link: http://www.funbrain.com/
Fun Brain is a website that helps younger elementary age students with reading. Fun Brain is easy to navigate and has a lot of familiar characters like, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Phineas and Ferb. Not only does this site have a lot of books to read, it also has a lot of fun games to help students read and to understand parts of grammar and sentence structure that might become confusing. Some of the games are:
Stay Afloat: Similar to Hangman
The Plural Girls: Twin sisters Pearl and Flora lost their friends in the bubble machine. Help them get their friends out by choosing the correct plural form.
Word Confusion: Help Regan the Vegan make fresh salad. Choose the correct word to complete each sentence.
The Grammar Gorillas: The Grammar Gorillas need help identifying parts of speech. If you click on the right word in the sentence, our friends get a banana. And you know, a gorilla with a banana is a gorilla with appeal.
Rooting Out Words: Help Remainder the Dog gather enough mushrooms to sell at the market by uncovering the roots of words.
I would integrate these fun games into my classroom by having the children complete and win certain games for some type of reward. This would be a fun way to motivate them to not only read, but learn with technology. They classroom could have a "Fun Brain" chart posted on the wall with the names of all the students and games. The students could check off or put a sticker under the game they completed. When they have completed all of their games for that level they then could move on to the next level or grade.
The students would be able to do this in their free time or maybe on a Friday fun day.
It was helpful to see your descriptions of each game. I also read your reflection #6 and thought that it would be nice to have someone's blog be a critique of teaching resources. I think they both would tie into this activities post. Since a few schools are now exploring only a hands-on/activity based curriculum, would you be concerned that the children would only be taking part when it was fun for them? I often wonder how their attention spans would be if they were to take a test when they have been "trained" to enjoy their different ways of learning.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that socially, as learning is changing, so are the rules of engagement. Do you think we should be preparing children to also have more technical learning sessions (lectures/reading multiple texts) or should children have the freedom to move around? (I wonder how it would be affecting future job environments)