To make things more fun in my session with my year 2 student today, I tried to incorporate more games whilst still making sure they were learning. In today’s session, I wanted to work on sentence writing so after our mid-session uno game, I utilised the card and asked him to pick one. Whatever number was on the card would be the number of words in the sentence, and wild cards were 12. I believe this was a highly beneficial game as it encouraged the student to work with sentences of different lengths and learn how to incorporate different kinds of words into his language. For example, one of the sentences needed 11 words and he initially wrote “The beach is a fun place to visit on holidays” which is 10 words. He was struggling to add in another word, so I suggested he use a ‘describing’ adjective word. So, he added in ‘special’ before beach. Thus, this developed his ability and understanding of the importance of different types of words in the sentence.

I have also incorporated spelling into a game of tic tac toe. This works by specifying a specific category such as ‘colours’ and instead of putting an ‘x’ or an ‘o’ into the box, you must spell a word. This helps to make learning new words and spelling more enjoyable which is especially important for younger primary school children as they often find it harder to concentrate for long periods of time. It makes the session more engaging.

Riva Burkett