Be Your Kid’s Hero: Let Them Play Webkinz

It’s a known fact: many children love Webkinz, but as a parent or educator you may be wondering if it is education as well as fun. With so many interesting and entertaining games and activities it’s no wonder hours can easily be spent on this website. As a parent of a child who loves Webkinz, I decided to take a critical look at several different activities and games that Webkinz offers to evaluate their educational properties. I fortunately found many worthwhile activities, some of which reinforced already acquired academic skills. I was also pleased to find a few activities that not only taught a particular skill, but also helped develop it. Here is a brief overview of each of the games and activities that I researched and my opinion of them.

Booger Gets an “A

This game teaches beginner students basic math skills. The complexity of the problems increase with each level. Students are encouraged to use strategy techniques as the speed is increased.

Get Eleven Solitaire

Get 11 Solitaire teaches and promotes math drills at a higher level then Booger Gets an “A”. It allows students to acquire visual processing skill as well as work on developing their strategy, pattern planning skills, and processing speed.

Employment Office: Example Baby-sitter

This activity offers many benefits including encouraging students to not only work on their visual recognition of facial expressions (sad, hungry, thirsty, tired), but also makes them give the appropriate response. As the levels increase students are given more “children to baby-sit” and the complexity of the tasks increase based on their response time to the facial expressions. This activity also promotes hand-eye coordination, usage of the mouse and is ideal for AS (Autistic Spectrum) kids who have difficulty “reading” people’s non-verbal expressions.


Quizzy’s Word Challenge

This game can encourage hand-eye coordination and mouse usage, while improving planning and strategy skills to earn more points. Although this game reinforces known spelling skills it is not a substitute for phonics or spelling programs.

Tulip Trouble II

This game seems at first glance to offer little in the way of education, yet as I went through the game I found that it allowed students to work on many worthwhile skills. The game offered students the opportunity to exercise their visual processing. It also encourages students to focus and pay particular attention to details and subtleties. Complexity and intensity builds by the level although it is somewhat diminished with the lag time between levels. Hand-eye coordination and speed skills are a part of this game.

Lunch Letters

The ability to type is a great one to possess yet this game does not teach typing skills. If your student knows “QWERTY” this game will most likely reinforce those already acquired skills. Speed and complexity increases with each level encouraging students to push their skills. Note: If your student uses the “hunt and peck” method, this game will simply encourage them to continue using this method and could make it even more challenging for them to transition to another typing method.

Quizzy’s Question Corner

The success of this game depends largely on how motivated your student is and if they are interested in learning the information as opposed to simply earning points. Although some good information may be gained from this game I worry about several aspects. This game makes it exceedingly easy for students to not even read the questions, but simply keep “clicking” the multiple choice answers until they choose the right one by accident (points are still given). This game is also concerning because it fails to focus on mastery of information, yet if the questions are read and the correct age group is selected knowledge can be gleaned from this game.

Goober’s Lab

This activity is a great way for students to work on their visual processing and speed while at the same time focusing on detail discrimination. As students attempt to get three or more of the same color “atoms” lined up in a row they are working on visual organization and planning skills. Good hand-eye coordination and processing speed is encouraged throughout this activity.

Eager Beaver Adventure Park

Many of the same features as Quizzy's word challenge exist in this activity, hover, with the added complication of having to use letters that will "explode" and collapse causing the beavers dam to break over time if you are not quick enough or able to use the needed letters. Helps with word search skills (visual processing), spelling skills, as well as processing speed.

Try these and many other online games and activities. Some other free activities that help exercise cognitive skills can be found by going to http://www.setgame.com/ , www.bigfishgames.com/bejeweled or http://www.blokus.com/.

If you are interested in purchasing games and activities that keep brain function active, please visit http://www.thebraintrainers.net/. For the hand held electronic SET game please contact The Brain Trainers as it is not yet available for sale on line.

Get a Brain Boast from Webkinz and many other activities that your children already want to do! You may reach Tara Jenner of The Brain Trainers by calling 239-218-4307 or emailing thebraintrainers@comcast.net, if you need assistance in cognitive skills testing or cognitive skills training that is specifically targeted to develop new neural pathways using the science of neural plasticity. Our online BrainSkills program may just be the jump start you or your child needs.

Auditory Games to Play with Your Family - Games Part 2

This next game that works auditory analysis skills was invented by my nine-year-old daughter after taking a series of cognitive and academic achievement tests. She calls this game “Copy Me!”.

This game can be played anytime, anyplace and by anyone. You can spend a long time at this game or just a few minutes. This game is the definition of flexibility.

Here’s how you play:

As with all cognitive skills training games, begin very simply and build one feature or item at a time in order to set your student up for success. This game is intended to help students hear sounds in the spoken word and be able to repeat them correctly – each and every sound. It helps develop the skills needed for blending and segmenting words – the foundational skills for reading and spelling.

Start with the basic sounds: /i/, /e/, /a/, /u/, and /o/ (the ‘short’ vowel sounds) as well as /t/, /d/, /m/, /n/, /k/, /p/, /s/. /b/, /w/, /f/, /h/, /l/, /z/, /r/, /v/. Start with single sounds and proceed from there. Make sure that you are making the sounds correctly. For example, the sound /d/ is often mispronounced as “duh”. Try your best to avoid using the extra sound (this is really /d/ /u/). You say ‘dad’ not ‘duh a duh’!

Once the single sounds are mastered, begin by combining them into nonsense words and say them to your child. Star with just a vowel and a consonant (VC or CV presentation). Any combination will work. No need to worry about spelling right now.

Some ‘words’ you may choose would be:

Ak, ip, ta, fi, de, un, co, su, ra, em, le, ba, op, wi, and so on.

Say the make believe word and the student must correctly repeat the “word” without mistakenly changing a sound. If a sound is substituted for a different sound simple say “beep” and repeat your word. NEVER let them slide on a sound being off. In this game close is not good enough as it could actually create an incorrect auditory interpretation of something spoken – in short a bad neural pathway.

If your child struggles with this, after four failed attempts, break the ‘word’ down into two sounds separated by a pause and then blend it together. For example: /p/ (pause) /u/ and then /pu/. If need be, your child can repeat the single sounds first and then follow with the blended nonsense word. You want your child to succeed not fail. If they try unsuccessfully too many times in a row they can come to believe they can’t do the activity and this can develop into an self fulfilling prophesy as their brains ‘learn’ to believe this lie as a truth.

Once the two sound words are mastered with all the sounds listed above, it would be appropriate to add in other sounds and more of them. Do this incrementally by adding new sounds to mastery and then (and only then) add in more complexity by increasing the number of sounds in the nonsense words. You can use all sounds including the ones that are usually spelled with more complex codes (such as ‘igh’ as in light and ‘oo’ like in look and boot) since you are not worrying about spelling at this time, just focus on the pronunciation and sounds.

My kids really get into this game and end up with words as silly and complicated as hinkpointching (if you have trouble reading it break it down: hink-point-ching) and hinklestinkerplock (hinkle-stinker-plock).

Have the kids join in by saying words of their own making to you so they can be “teacher” and you the “student”. Occasionally, it is helpful to give them the opportunity to correct your mispronunciation of a sound within the word you are given by them. When they get really good you probably won’t even have to try to give them the opportunity to correct you – it will happen often enough anyway!

As Plutarch said : Many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little.

Enjoy!

Tara

Auditory Games to Play with Your Family – Games Part 1

OK so it took me a little longer than a week to get this blog entry up. Life is fun with 2 kids and a business …but often a little unpredictable :-)

This first game is a twist on “I spy!” Instead of the traditional approach of “I spy with my little eye something beginning with the letter I” (and you are looking at an ice cream or a picture of an igloo), simply switch to focusing on the sounds. Play the game “I hear with my little hear, something with the sound /i/ (like the first sound in igloo)” or the sound /i-e/ (like in ice cream)”.

At this stage it is not important that the players can identify which written letter or letters would be used to correctly spell the word. The focus is on the sounds only.

Taking this same game a little further, you can then have the child “spell” using sounds only. My little boy just turned 5 on March 30th and he thinks you spell “cat” with the sounds /c/, /a/, and /t/, and further that these sounds are represented by the letters ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ respectively. This way he can “spell by the sounds” really big and complicated words such as “birthday” by saying the sounds /b/, /er/, /th/, /d/, /a-e/ with breaks in between. He will later be able to learn which letter or letters are used to correctly represent those sounds in these words.

The Can Do Cubes phonics program, available on my web site, is a great tool to introduce the sounds and their written symbols. Made of solid wood with the written correspondences engraved onto each side of the cubes, they offer a tactile and visual component to the learning process. The cubes come in two boxes. The first box is Stage One, consisting of at least one written representation of each of the sounds in the English language. Stage Two introduces more complex written variations of the sounds.

The Can Do Cubes phonics program is great for beginners as well as those who need to back track to grasp this sound and code component of spelling and reading. Since spelling and reading are the flip side of the same coin, these skills are taught back to back. Fluency of segmenting, blending, and decoding and encoding are necessary for fluid reading and ease of comprehension. This program helps promote those skills.

This product is non-consumable and, therefore, very cost efficient when used in a family of more than one student. The cubes are very durable (believe me my son has tried his best to destroy them and has been unsuccessful after over a year’s use) and hold their resale value too.

It is easy to see using the Can Do Cubes that a single sound change can change an entire word.

The Can Do Cubes phonics program is very good for children who need to be on the move to learn best. My son likes to stack the cubes as he earns them (by correct recognition of the sound or the code) which helps with fine motor skills. When the stack is high enough he earns the right to either kick them over (only when given permission, but this also helps with other gross motor skills such as standing on one foot while the other has to aim at a target) or roll a ball at them like in bowling (again a good motor skill). My son sometimes likes slam dunking them into a small makeshift basketball hoop or bucket.

You and your child get to make up the rules. The possibilities are endless and you will be pleasantly surprised how creative your child can be. Remember that rewards for getting the sounds and code correct will cause a burst of dopamine, helping to lock in the learning, so let them experiment with different ways of working with the cubes.

My next entries will be on some games that help with sound recognition using nonsense words. My nine-year old daughter has called the first one “Copy Me!” and the second one “Fill in the Blanks”.

For more information on auditory analysis skills, testing and training visit The Brain Trainers.

By the way.....I hear with my little ear something beginning with /b/ (hint I’m tired)! Until next time.

Tara