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!