Game-based Learning for 1st thru 6th Grades

All school year, I've been using a variety of games from ABCya.com to support classroom objectives. After a little bit of digging, I recently tripped upon the Arcademics website which offers a host of games that span over several topics:

• Addition
• Subtraction
• Division
• Multiplication
• Integers
• Decimals
• Money
• Decimals
• Time
• Algebra
• Fractions and Ratios
• Spelling
• Geography
• Word Relationships
• Typing

These games were built for Grades 1st thru 6th, and several of them have an iPad app. that goes for 99 cents. The nice bonus here is that each month, the website offers one app. for free.

The thing that I love the most about this site is that it incorporates the use of usernames (without passwords). Thus, in teaching students as young as First Grade about the importance of Digital Citizenship and being safe online, this site proves to be very useful.

At the beginning of the school year, I taught students about the importance of being safe online. In this particular lesson, we talked about usernames and how they help to keep us safe online. I had each First Grader create their own username based on some of their favorite animals, foods, colors, numbers and letters. As a result, I got some creative little combos.

cat8bird
ggme725
bridog2
piza3pi

The beauty of this lesson was that the students were over the moon with excitement about being able to use their self-created usernames to play some of the Arcademics games.

This lesson is a MUST for teaching students the importance of staying safe online. The fact that they get to practice some core skills in timed settings is an added bonus.