Making the Point

The challenge posed by decimals and percents stumps me in my everyday life. When I worked in the post office and had to figure out the percentage increase or decrease in revenue or mail volume over the previous year, I would stare blankly at my computer screen trying to figure out how to formulate the equation, then eventually give up and turn to my co-worker who had do

ne well in high school math and at one point considered becoming a Certified Public Accountant. She always knew how to figure out the problem and, much as she tried to explain it to me, I just couldn't seem to wrap my brain around it. The games included in this blogpost give students practice converting decimals and percents into each other.

Jeopardy Math, complete with sound effects, follows the familiar Jeopardy format and quizzes students on fractions and decimals. Keep pencil and paper nearby when you play--you'll need it!

We love football in my house, and Power Football had us competing to solve decimal multiplication and division problems to score field goals and touchdowns and win the game.

The Decimals and Percents Game at math-play.com gives students timed, multiple choice quizzes designed to demonstrate th

eir understanding of how a number is represented as a decimal or as a percent. I struggled with this one and really feel like I need to get a better handle on these skills so that I at least know where to begin the process of figuring out these conversions.

Look it Up (If You Don't Believe Me)

I included this website for two reasons. The first is that it so thoroughly explains how to use a dictionary. I think we sometimes forget to explain this basic tool to students, and everything "dictionary" is covered here. The dictionary is the first reference I turn to and this site taught me a few new things. The second reason it's included is that my daughter attended Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, California. Cuesta is a great community college for Big Island kids who want to get off the island but might miss the ocean and the climate too much. They can find both at Cuesta.

The engaging spelling games included on Gamesgames.com include

titles like Text Twist, Letter Detective and Word Mojo. The link will take you to a page with all these and more. The graphics are great and a wide subject matter gets covered.

So far in my teaching career I haven't seen a spelling bee in the classroom. Every year I like to watch the Hawaii State Spelling Bee on television. One year I knew one of the contestants and felt bad when he got eliminated. This spelling bee is a little less stressful.

If You Say So

Hi Students and Parents,

This week's blog post includes games to help students get a grip on the parts of speech and their agreement with each other. The names of parts of speech are used often and can even cause teachers to stop and think to make sure they understand the difference between prepositions, conjunctions, infinitives and others. The game "Parts of Speech Word Search" uses the popular "find the hidden word" format to identify common terms. Responses are timed and these key terms can be scrambled into plenty of new puzzles.

A great resource for internet learning games, Funbrain offers many interactive activities to reinforce the rules of writing. "The Plural Girls" emphasizes proper construction of plurals as students make their way through tricky English words that take more than an "s" to represent two or more.

The agreeable "CopyCat Game" quizzes tense agreement in an enjoyable fashion. Everythin

g sounds so positive in this game, as students select the answer that goes along with the original statement. You'll see what I mean.

Express a Complete Thought

Greetings,

This week's games help students with sentence construction. "Character Scrapbook" gives students a way to keep a log of the characters they've become acquainted with in class reading. The scrapbook page prompts students to write sentences that give specific details about the character's appearance and actions. With the option to print a hard copy, students can create their own reading journal as a creative study aid.

"Grammar Gorillas" awards points to students for correctly identifying the parts of speech in sentences. There seems to be a limitless number of entertaining sentences to amuse players while reinforcing their understanding of nouns, adverbs, conjunctions and other sentence components.

To really challenge students, give them quizzes from GrammarBook.com, "your number one source for grammar and punctuation." Many other grammar quizzes are available on this site. Students must pay close attention when they read these multiple choice exercises that ask them to "choose the best sentence."

Taking It Literally

Dear Parents,

I dedicate this week's blog post to improving students' understanding of literal information. But before we get into that, I just wanted to give you another game in the same category as the Spiderman game from my last post. This one's called Scribble and gives you a random sample of letters to form into as many words as you can as quickly as possible. To play, just scribble your words on a piece of paper. The letter combinations are limitless!

In MeaningFall, students must "help the warrior cross the watery caverns, read the word definitions and guess the words that are hidden behind the clouds." It will make sense when you see it. I especially like the audio on this game!

The game Fact or Opinion? asks students to read a statement and then indicate whether it is fact or opinion. I zoomed through this one and missed a couple, so it helps to pay careful attention when reading the statements.

The last game in our list helps students with Science vocabulary. Science Labeling gives students a short time to study a diagram of various scientific systems and then asks them to label the parts they've learned. I learned the parts of a fish with this game!

Words at Work in Whatever We Study: Resources for Applying Word Skills Across the Curriculum

Dear Parents,

I know you and I share the goal of having your student excel in every subject in school. It is important for students to apply their vocabulary skills across different content areas. In this blog post, I've included links to internet games that will provide a help system for times when students need help figuring out words independently. The more your youngster understands basic vocabulary concepts not only in language arts but in every subject, the better they will do in school.






The first game is called Antonym Challenge. You can find it on the Sadlier-Oxford website. Antonym Challenge is just one of several games that will open in a smaller window on your computer screen. These games really held my attention, and the varying skill levels made them effective for elementary and secondary students.







Another website that has a few games to choose from is provided by Crickweb from the United Kingdom. The one I've chosen here is Number Labeling, because it matches numerals one through nine with their printed names. It's not complicated but will serve students well in understanding numbers in both written and numerical form. The website also includes color labeling and sequencing games.





Finally, I'm including Spiderman-Web-of-Words. (It takes about ten seconds to get through the advertisement). It's hard. Unscrambling letters to form a word has always been a difficult vocabulary challenge for me. I confess that I did not score well at all on this one. So, I plan to keep visiting in order to improve that skill in myself. I also really like the graphics on this one and have always loved Spiderman!

Welcome

Welcome to the Wild World of Words, an edublog designed to enhance secondary students' vocabulary acquisition.