Inspiration

A couple of weeks ago, I started creating a sound word game with one of my favorite Piggie and Gerald books, Pigs Make Me Sneeze. Around the same time, I saw a post from Tom Heck in the Makey Makey Educator group where participants in his workshop  created an invention that helps young students learn new words. It was a serendipitous a-ha moment for me! I could make my own interactive word board so that my kinder kids could be empowered to play the sight word matching game on their own!

Gaining Confidence

It’s been a pretty cool week, I’ve watched some of my kinder kids who are still getting the hang of reading sight words find confidence in becoming self sufficient by utilizing the word wall. Watch them use the sound board to find the right matches below.

Scratch Game

In case you are interested, here is the Scratch Game that I created to play the sounds. I went a little overboard making the words pop-up, but it was a fun Scratch challenge for me to attempt having my word only appear for a short time, and then go back to the Scratch cat.

(Unfortunately, Scratch won’t embed on WordPress, but make sure you go here to check out the game.)

Make Your Own!

I shared the tweet of my kinder kids on the Future Ready Librarians Facebook group and had a lot of librarians ask me how I made this interactive word wall. Maybe I’ve been hanging out with Design Make Teach too much, but I thought I’d throw together a quick tutorial on Youtube. Enjoy!

Last Note – Empower the teachers- empower the learners…

While it is cool for teachers to make their own manipulatives, it is even cooler when students can use these ideas in their own projects. My next step at school is to get my 4th and 5th graders to create interactive literacy games for their reading buddies. One group has shown interest in making sentence boards and another wants to make personalized word walls for their kinder buddies!

Let me know what you and your students Makey Makey with this idea!