Games

I don't write here as often as I should, some of it is not really being sure what to what and some of it is just plain laziness! But since I learned about the Million Minute Challenge for counting minutes playing games, I have been writing about games we have played. Two of the newest ones we have tried are Food Fight and Math Mart.

This isn't a formal review, just a couple new games we found and have tried.

Food Fight is a game for learning about equivalent fractions, percentages, and decimals. We tried it today, but found it pretty challenging as my 9 year old has a fairly decent grasp of those subjects, but my 6 year old just gets something things with fractions. I think I will have to come up with some other way to use the cards and play a game or we will just have to wait a bit to use it.

Now, Math Mart is something they can both do. It is a collection of approximately 200 cards with math story problems in all 4 major operations as well as fractions, graphs, and time and money. Each card is labeled with an amount of money (.25, .50 and $1). These money amounts are used to decide who wins the game. When someone answers the math problem correctly they get to keep the card. At the end of play the value of the cards each player has is totaled up and the highest total wins. This was something that they both could play together and were fairly well matched. If fact, my 6 year old won by .75 ! This game was enjoyed much more than food fight.

Both Food Fight and Math Mart are produced by Edupress and I purchased them at the local teacher store.

Hopefully, I can post again in a couple days. I have something really neat to share with all of you, but I need to get the pics onto my computer first. Just let me say, it was a big surprise to us and very interesting to keep watching.

Read Write Type New TOS review

Read Write Type

The Home Edition $79
Includes 2 Cd ROM's: Read Write Type and Spaceship challenge

Online Edition Begins at $35 for one user. Various costs for additional users

Story books and a paper practice keyboard can be downloaded from the site.

Read Write Type is for grades K-3. Also for ESL students. Could be used by older children, but they might find the cartoon like characters too juvenile.

Also available from Talking Fingers: WORDY QWERTY

Also a computer product that continues where RWT leaves off. It helps students to improve their spelling skills, especially with confusing or "don't follow the rules" words. This has an age level of 7-9 years or 2 -4 grades. There are 20 lessons and songs.
CD $35 Online beginning at $25
READ WRITE TYPE and WORDY QWERTY are available in a bundle for $99

Check the Talking Fingers website to make sure the products will work with your Operating System before purchasing.

I remember the first time I ever had the opportunity to use a computer as a child . I was in 5th grade. It sat on a table height rolling cart and rotated among classrooms so each room had it for one week. What a treat to use the computer. I have memories of playing Oregon Trail in the old DOS format.

Fast forward a few years (I am not telling how many :) )

Now, who can think about life without a computer. It is the rare home that doesn't have at least one and they are all over in schools. From what I am told computer class is a weekly fixture on the schedule for children of all grades. Computers have become such a presence in our lives it is important to teach our children how to use them well and appropriately. The educational uses of computers and the internet are virtually (no pun intended) unlimited. With computers being an overwhelming presence in our lives it has become important to teach our children to use them, even at an early age, and help them develop the skills they will need to use them productively. The need to know how to type fluently is certainly important. But how can we ever fit something else into our already full to over flowing schedule?

What if typing could be learned at the same time as other skills or subjects? Can typing instruction and practice be incorporated in Language Arts as it all deals with words?

Let me introduce Read Write and Type - an interactive program from Talking Fingers.

As the Talking Fingers website says the idea behind Read Write and Type is "Text is speech made Visible". We talk with our mouths, use our fingers to represent those words on paper. When children realize that they can write the sounds they are speaking they can use the alphabet to write any word they can say. Now their fingers can talk.

Thus a whole new world of communication is opened up to the student.

Read Write and Type has put phonics, spelling, reading, and typing together in a program called Talking Fingers. Children play an engaging game where they must help Lefty and Rightway, talking cartoon hands, to outwit Vexor, the villain and let the Storytellers tell their stories. Each letter has its own character, with their own special story and many words that begin with that letter. Lefty and Rightway teach the child proper finger placement on the keyboard throughout the program. Each hand is given a color and the keyboard on the screen is divided to show which hand is on each half of the keyboard. As each character, letter on the keyboard is introduced, the hands show the student which finger is supposed to stretch or reach to type that particular letter. Hopefully, this will help children learn proper typing position and save them from a life of hunt and peck. Read Write and Type smoothly blends fun and learning into one irresistible activity.

While they are saving the letters, children learn the sounds the letters make, pick out pictures that have the target sound at the beginning, middle, or end and practice typing the letter. In more advanced levels, children also type simple stories after hearing them, practice spelling words, and even write their own original emails. (Email stays with in the Read Write Type system).

The format of the lessons is very similar from level to level, but complexity of spelling and sentences increases as the student progresses. In more difficult levels the children also learn how the letters form diagraphs. The sentences and paragraphs they are asked to type increase in length.

The Talking Fingers website has a resource section with many downloadable pdfs to make the RWT experience even better. (Just click on the downloads oval). Some of the resources available are a scope and sequence so off line activities can be coordinated with Read Write Type, story books featuring the characters, as well a paper keyboard for practice off the computer. There are many more resources available.


How I Used Talking Fingers

My 6 year old First Grader has learned with Talking Fingers online over the last few weeks. He can't wait until he is allowed to play each day. He has loved every minute of the time he has spent learning with Read Write and Type. He has enjoyed it so much that he is almost finished with the program. We did not use the printable story books as he is quite a strong reader and he was not interested in them. They are very cute, however. I sat with him while he did the first 3 levels, but left him to use the remaining program more independently. I would occasionally look over his shoulder and remind him to keep his fingers in the proper position as needed.

He says "I like everything about it, it is very fun. It is very educational. I can't resist playing it every day". He also loved the certificates at the end of each level.

There is the option to change the passing level from the default of 70%, which I changed shortly after he started playing. He does very well with reading, so I wanted to make it challenging for him with spelling and phonics. However, it appears that 100% (which I had set the pass level to) only needs to be achieved in one of the 3 criteria before moving on to the next level. I am still investigating how this works. I would find this feature more productive if it could be set for each criteria or if the passing level applied to the average of all the criteria at each level.

I really like how Read Write and Type seamlessly merges phonics,spelling, reading and typing in one engaging program that keeps the users interest. After such a positive experience with Read Write and Type I am going to consider Wordy Qwerty to continue keyboarding practice for my children.

Read what other Crew Members have to say here.

Disclaimer: I was given free access to the online version of this program to use and assist me in writing this review. All opinions and thoughts expressed here are solely my own. I have not received any other compensation for this review.

Games, Games, Games

A while back I decided I was going to write about some of the board games my family enjoys playing. I wrote about a couple, but then had other more pressing things to take care of and didn't get back to writing. During the break I heard about the Million Minute Challenge, which is a promotion to encourage playing board games with family and friends. I signed up for it and we continued to play. You can read about the Million Minute Challenge here. http://www.millionminute.com/

Yesterday I logged my minutes for the first time and was pleasantly surprised to figure out my family had played games for over 600 minutes! I was shocked, I didn't realize it was that much time. How time flies when you are having fun. The Challenge runs through December, so we'll see how many we get by the close of the promotion.

So back to our favorite games, I asked my 6 year old for his favorite games, these are some he mentioned:

Mouse Trap
Monopoly
Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader ?
Zoorecka
Busy Busy Builder
Professor Noggin Trivia Games
Don't Break the Ice
Sorry and Sorry Sliders
Uno
Pyramath See review for this game here on my blog


He also likes Money Bags and Made for Trade which I wrote about before.

Other favorites are:

Postcards across America
You travel Cross Country collecting pictures of landmarks from all 50 states and try to visit more places before your opponents. The catches being you can only travel so far in each turn and you can get sent back.

Spelling Bee
Spell simple words by collecting tiles. However, it can take a long time to get anywhere.

Cooking up Sentences
Take your inner Chef to English class. Each player chooses a recipe card for a baked good, but insted of listing food ingredients it gives you parts of speech. Words are placed on tiles color- coded for each part of speech and each type is placed in a different pile. While traveling around the board you have to determine if a word you choose matches the part of speech you landed on in order to keep the tile. The challenge is to amass all the different "ingredients" you need without an opponent taking any of your tiles and then somehow putting them into a sentence making sure you use all the parts of speech in your recipe. It doesn't have to make sense, but just be grammatically correct. Sounds easy enough, but it is challenging at times.

Well, this is probably enough for now. I will have to write again with some of my daughter's favorite games.