All of the children in our year group have been enjoying using our class Nintendo Wiis and we have even used them to support the numeracy work that has been going on over the previous week. A student teacher began work in my colleague’s classroom on Monday and was amazed to see him enjoying a game of tenpin bowling on the Wii with some children from his class. She remarked that she was not expecting to see that when she walked in!
In addition to looking at ways the console can support parts of the curriculum, I have added a bit of structure to how we use the Wii just for fun in the class. The children can earn Wii Minutes from me through all the usual avenues of hard work and good behaviour.
I have 15 and 25 Wii Minute tickets to give away which would allow someone to play on it during a breaktime or at a lunchtime. I thought it would be fun to have the tickets in the shape of the Wii remotes and on the flipside is the number of minutes as you can see in the picture. I set my teaching assistant on to it and once printed the images of the remotes were backed with gold card and laminated along with the number of minutes – simple.
The children have been motivated and enthusiastic to earn them alongside the usual class reward system we have. Yesterday a pair of children enjoyed a game together who had both earned some time and today a boy who was working brilliantly throughout the morning chose a friend to join him in a blast on Wii baseball.
In my opinion it gives me a great way to reward those children who are always working so hard and do it with a smiles on their faces. The reward is genuinely engaging for them and they love playing it on the big screen with plenty of room to swing the bat or serve an ace.