Friday, May 25, 2012

Teaching Phonics, Phonemic & Elkonin Boxes

Elkonin boxes can be used to teach phonemic awareness.
What are they?

Elkonin boxes are worksheets with have a spot to physically segment  words into phonemes.  
 So, using the word "phonemes" as an example, students would be asked to put it into its five sounds or phonemes by having a horizontal triangle split into five spaces.

f O - n E m
More later on how to deal with digraphs, long and short vowels, syllables, spacing, and methodology.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Three college level courses that I'd like to take


  

In making kids online education, these materials would be good.  But alas, I might have neither the time nor the background.  Still, here I am bookmarking them!!!
WordFind

Computer Science
Game Theory http://www.game-theory-class.org/

Natural Language Processing http://www.nlp-class.org/

Human-Computer Interaction http://www.hci-class.org/
Here's my latest game design. I think it could be better, especially the scoring.

VSC WordFind is a fun way to study your spelling and vocabulary words while searching for new words. How many words can you make using the letters in each word on your list? The more words you find and the faster you find them, the higher your score will be! You may even be ranked on the high score table!
WordFind Instructions: The box on the left of this word game tells you how many words you need to find (in addition to your spelling/vocabulary word) in order to advance. To create words, click and drag the letters into the boxes. Once you have created a new word, click the Submit button. To shuffle the letters, click the round button with the arrows. To clear the boxes, click the Clear button. If you need a hint to figure out some words, click the Hint button. Click Hint Type to alternate between definitions and sentences.
Once you have found enough words to advance, you can click on the Next button to move forward and start your word search all over again with the next word. You can also continue finding words until you have found all possible words to boost your score. As an extra challenge, see if you can find any anagrams for your words! Anagrams are words that are formed by using all of the letters in a given word, but in a different order - like "vase" and "save".

To play with colors.