donquijote.org

My students have been learning about the Spanish alphabet lately. One of our main projects is to create a classroom power point "Spanish Alphabet Video". We are sending these videos to the younger students at each school who do not have the opportunity to take spanish. Students have been going to the donquijote.org/spanishlearning/ website to practice their spanish letters. There is an alphabet that allows you to click on each letter. A pop up box appears with a picture of the word that starts with the letter. I have enjoyed listening to my students play this game. As I walk by I can hear them say the letters and the words with perfect pronunciation. It has been a wonderful enhancement activity for them. Also on the site is a link to practice spanish numbers in the same way. The Latin Culture link is also popular, but some of the pictures of the artists are a little too provocative. I also have to warn them not to click on the youtube link while exploring the site.

Lil-Fingers Games

My son and I are still looking up new toddler games. We found some games at www.lil-fingers.com/games/. I wasn't very happy with them. Although the site was supposed to be for "little fingers" it was awfully hard for my son's little fingers to play the games! The ABC matching game had 20 tiles! That's too many for little ones to try to match! The Storybooks were a nice feature. They were animated with sound. I tried the one for numbers and the alphabet-very cute! I also liked the coloring pages. The Holidays was also a nice feature. It included thematic games, stories, and activities for various holidays and events.

Sandbox of God

I played Sandbox of God to check out some games that were made with Game Maker Pro. The game has one basic screen throughout each level/era. There is a hill and sky that shows some light and clouds from the sun. There are boxes in the corner that you click on for various acts of God. Some of the first boxes were rain, wind, animals, plants, humans. I chose plants first, then rain. The picture box of the wind looked like tornado so I was afraid to use it until it was the last one. I felt silly when I finally used it because it created wind that scattered the seed to grow more plants. I wish I had tried it before and my little animals and people would have fared better!

PBS Kids

My "Little Man" and I have continued to explore the pbskids.org gamesite this week. I watched him playing a Berenstain Bears game with his daddy the other night. He choose clothes from a box to dress each character. His daddy had more fun than he did, taking over the controls because they were too hard for him. He was dressing him in costumes and football uniforms all at once. We also checked out the Clifford games. In one of the games he had to choose if Big Clifford or Little Clifford could do certain tasks such as jump over the fence or crawl through the little hole, stand under the tree or over the tree. More to come...

Fisher-Price and PBS Kids Online Games

Even though I didn't post anymore on the JumpStart game, my toddler and I have been playing it a lot. He has gotten pretty good at using the mousepad on our laptop, but I plan to buy a mouse pretty soon. Thanks, Dr. Miller, for your mouse recommendation!
I was getting a little tired of playing the JumpStart game, so I decided to check out what was available online for my tike. I found some interesting games for us, which makes me happy. Variety is the spice of life, isn't that what they say? At www.fisher-price.com/us/playtime I found some enjoyable games for my two-year-old. The site has games for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. The games can be as simple as holding a baby in your lap and letting them push buttons on the keyboard. As each button is pushed for the alphabet game, the corresponding letter pops up saying the letter name, shows and says the name of an animal for the letter and gives a little animation of it. My son enjoyed the letter game. He's really been interested in the alphabet lately. He loves to read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault. It was a good game for him because I could tell him to find a letter on the keyboard and he could see if he was right automatically with reinforcement from the game.
We also tried out http://www.pbskids.org/. My son loves Curious George, but I was dissapointed in the games that I found for him. They would be suitable for an older child. My husband was even challenged by the shape game. He had to catch each shape as it came out of a machine tpye of thing. I explained that maybe he should be playing at a kid's level instead of an adult level! It did prove to adjust to the players skill level! I will post more about other PBS games when we've had a chance to play them. We plan to check out the Clifford games next, another of my son's favorites.

Jump-Start Advanced Preschool

I think I've found the game that I want to evaluate for our first big mission! I didn't have time to look around much, so I didn't have much to select from for my content area-Spanish. I did find a neat looking game called something like Mayan Princess, but I didn't think I would play it enough to spend the money on it and it didn't seem to have much content about the Maya! So, I decided to buy a game that would serve two purposes. I bought the Jumpstart Preschool game for 2-4 year olds becuase I could play it with my son , Alton, while evaluating it. Plus it will last him awhile and it's given him a good start on the computer. Other than dropping the laptop on his toe this summer (which left a nasty black spot that is still trying to grow with his big toe nail) and wrestling with me and sitting on the laptop while I did homework-this will be his first computer experience! I had a hard time choosing between the Jumpstart game and the one with Sesame Street characters. I think Alton would have enjoyed seeing his favorite characters on it, but I selected the Jumpstart because it has some Spanish activities. Not only can I evaluate the Spanish content, but my son can learn it and practice it too! I intend to teach him Spanish little by little, but we're mostly working on English right now!
We have only gotten to play it once so far, but there is a lot to go through. There are five CDs. I think each CD is a little harder. Still have to check that out. One CD is for 4-6 year olds. It is a virtual world that can be visited on the internet. It allows the player to run, jump, and swim in the virtual world, adopt and train pets, and more. There are options for parents to leave notes for their children, add photos of family and friends, and even print out real-usable rewards.
I'll post more as we continue to play the game together. Alton has been having a hard time using the touch pad mouse on our laptop. I think I should hook up the real mouse for our next round to see how he does. Wish us luck!

Weeks 2-3:Gaming Trials

I have honestly not made time to play games for my class until this week. It's hard to find time to play games unless it's a game I can play with my students or my two year old. I was putting it off, but found that when I made a point to do it I enjoyed it and about one hour went by and I didn't know it. I have been attempting to find as many online games that would be suitable for my Spanish students to play in class. This is taking just as much time as actually trying out the games themselves. There are a lot to weed through!

Some of the games I played this week that I did not enjoy were found on a couple of websites. They were just too simple. My students might enjoy them more than me because they are for very low level Spanish learners. Some were simple crossword puzzles for the seasons, months, and such. Some were dot to dot, hearing the Spanish numbers pronounced at each dot. At the last dot the picture was displayed or animated and a song was played. This would be good for my students to practice seeing the number and hearing it in Spanish. Some of the pictures were good because they pertained to Spanish culture in some fashion. For example, on picture was of a certain hispanic country's flag and the song played was their national anthem. One interesting thing I found on these sites was an animation of a "cucaracha" dancing to the "La Cucaracha" song as the words came up on the screen. This could also be useful for students because they can follow along with the words and understand the meaning by watching the yucky little bug get down with the beat. Of course, I would need to explain the origin of the song to them and how it relates to hispanic history, which I would need to research further since it has been since high school that I have thought about the "Cucaracha" song. I think it has something to do with a battle in a certain hispanic country. My high school Spanish teacher would be sad! But I did remember that much and it has been a long time!

There were a few games that I found that I did enjoy, but would not neccesarily be approriate for the level of learning for my students. One game gave an english word and prompted me to type in the equivalent spanish word. This was fun because each time I typed the correct word a flower bloomed. However, each time I typed in an incorrect word the flower died, which was kind of sad. I typed in the translation I use with my class for the word "brown" and killed a flower. It did make me remember the other way to say "brown" though! It was also neat that you could change the background appearance to suit your taste from a "day" scene to a "night" scene. I liked the "night" scene because the colors were more appealing to me and the moon was rising as I played to show the time lapse.

I have been playing a game in class this week with my students that is the translation of "Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar". The kids love it. They are getting to play an active game, which involves everyone, especially the "Cookie Crook" and the "Detective". I love it because I get to hear all my students saying it even as they go down the hallways. They are not only learning to read the entire chant, but also have learned to pronounce and read the entire thing in Spanish!