Gamification in First Grade

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted and even my last post in 2015 was me trying to get back into it. Having my first child in 2015 and second child in 2018 will do that to a blogger I guess. As a teacher-mom, it’s a full-time job being a teacher. I come home and take on a mightier role of parent. And maybe, just maybe, have a shred of energy to do more school work / lesson planning or surrender to my exhaustion after the kids go to bed. As many of you might know, it’s a major shift when you become a parent – you relearn who you are, you change, you come to terms with the new you, etc. That transition happens even more as a teacher-mom because it also happen to your identity in the classroom. Each year as I’ve come back after a maternity leave, I have put so much pressure on myself to “lean in” and be that perfect teacher still. Thanks, Sheryl Sandberg. Ha! I want so badly to do all of the things and do them all well.

This year, coming back from my second maternity leave was hard on so many levels and for so many reasons. It’s taken me all semester to feel back to myself as a teacher, but all it took was a gamified unit and a Fancy Nancy costume… and I FELT BACK!

I’ve heard about gamification probably almost as long as I had heard of project based learning. I could just never wrap my head around it, especially for first graders. I knew I loved PBL. With gamification, I had some must haves and some things I did not want – before totally immersing myself in it. I did not want to pay a lot of money for a program or something computer based. I did want to figure out how it could coincide with my curriculum just as PBL had. It could not take up more time than I had. It needed to engage students in the work.

This year, we decided as a school to take a step back from PBL and just focus in on the structures of our curriculum. Which totally makes sense, to get better at something you must focus and practice it. But, I’ll admit, I lost a big part of me. I lost a part of my creative freedom. Through this transition, I felt helpless, but also exhausted because of having an infant at home. I wanted more from my curriculum, but was struggling to find time to make it all that it could be (in my standards). I wanted to engage my learners in disguised learning – the “oh my gosh, that was so fun… was that actually school?” learning.  There were two things I was learning about this unique class – they were not engaged in the our curriculum’s lessons as past classes had been and they seemed to love playing games. They thrived on even getting to play 4 corners before a reading mini lessons. It was one of the only ways to get them to sit through a 15 minute mini lesson. That’s when gamification popped back on my radar! I told a colleague that I just had to figure out a way to combine their love of games with our lessons!

I saw one of my favorite tweeps, Carol McLaughlin, trying it with her students and a reading unit. She inspired me to keep pushing through my thinking of how this would work in my class. Carol also shot me some great links of Michael Matera’s gaming knowledge. Check him out, SERIOUSLY! With my husband’s great knowledge of GenCon type games, we had several conversations about how I could incorporate this in class. Now, I’m on the other side of this unit. I can truly say, I think, I successfully implemented gamification or gamified a reading unit. Without further ramblings…

The Premise: Fancy Nancy Versus Amelia Bedelia(s)

I utilized ChatterPix and iMovie on my iPhone to quickly make the storyline. ChatterPix of a Fancy Nancy 30 second talk and then made a separate 30 second talk for Amelia Bedelia. I tied these two movies together by using iMovie.

Fancy Nancy says, “Hello, my name is Fancy Nancy. And,  I find Amelia Bedelia… quite fascinating. How does one have so many books, but does not understand words? I challenge her to an extraordinary battle of word knowledge, but first you’ll have to help ‘school her’ along the way. Please help give her some strategies. I don’t want this to be easy. Ta-ta.”

Amelia Bedelia says, “A battle, you say, why I’ve read many books about battles from America’s past. Battles with horses, and armies, and canons. But, I don’t quite understand how these children will ‘school me.’ Schools are too heavy to pick up. I am always willing to learn new words and will happily take your challenge! Just give me 15 days to learn. Goodbye.”

Learning Standards (Indiana First Grade):

• 1.RV.2.1: Use strategies to determine and clarify words.
• 1.RV.1: Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, reading and being read to, and responding to literature and nonfiction text to build and apply vocabulary.
• 1.RV.3.2: Ask and answer questions to help determine or clarify the meaning of words and phrases in a text.

Curriculum: Lucy Calkins – Unit 3: Big Jobs to Do

Many teachers that utilize this curriculum create little cards/post-its with Lucy’s lesson strategies to leave with students during reading conferences. We often use these strategies for goal setting – whether it’s teacher directed or chosen by our students. With gamification, the small change that was made was that I utilized each lesson’s strategy “card” as a badge. I made them fit with our theme. Each badge had Amelia Bedelia saying something about the strategy. I did often have to fit or change our curriculum lessons to help them connect deeper with our Indiana Standards. Some of the word attack and/or accuracy type lessons could be done with smaller groups that needed it the most. While more whole group was focused on understanding words (which 75% of my class needed more) – using comprehension strategies and understanding types of words like homophones, synonyms, antonyms, and idioms (without having to identify or name them). Just understanding that we must be ready for words to be hard to understand and we also must be ready for them to sometimes deceive our literal minds. Amelia Bedelia was a great example of this!

Process:

• Students were challenged with the initial video.
• Students were broken up into 3 teams of mixed abilities. Being on a team, took away that fear of individual failure.
• Each new reading lesson and strategy included a badge worth a certain amount of “XP”, which I personally love that kids love these experience points. That’s what school is/should be – an experience! At least, it should be one of the best experiences and practices for real life. Students placed badges on their goal bookmarks that we had already made at the beginning of the year. They were beyond proud to add these. It was so nice to see something positive on there… not that giving strategies for goal setting is completely negative, but it does often focus on the deficit of their reading. A badge was like a compliment. It came at the perfect time for us. At the end of a semester, when all students could use a confidence boost.
• Each lesson got harder and harder – until the last lessons introduced students to some similes and idioms. That meant our badge XP was worth more and more. I thought about making the badges the same amount of points, but students wanted them to continue to increase. For example, a badge for identifying that you didn’t understand a word might be 5 xp, but a badge trying to understand an idiom might be 15 xp.
• We added some “training” days towards the end and right before the boss battle so students could think about and practice any strategy within their reading time.
• Students craved the badges. “What can I do for that one?” or “Mrs. Lash! My partner and I just did ___!”
• Students also had input on what they wanted the Boss Battle to look like. They wanted some kind of action card, potion, special attack, or power up that would allow them to do different things during the game. They wanted fire or ice balls, extra healing powers,  llamas…, a plant eating person…, and gadgets. My students and my husband really were the brains behind our Boss Battle.

Boss Battle:

A boss battle is a fun way to do a test. It’s a finale to weeks of training and learning in any game. You go in hoping you’ve learned enough, but also have a little luck on your side. I knew I wanted students to answer questions dealing with telling me what a word meant. I created 28 questions. Some questions were about thinking of a fancier synonym for a word or a fancier antonym for a word. Example: A student thought of “destructive” for a fancier opposite of calm. I repeat… a first grade student thought of this! Some questions had a small paragraph story with a word in pink and they had to decide what the word meant. Some questions had students tell the separate meanings of a pair of homophones – like here versus hear. The cool aspect was I only asked for what it meant – I didn’t tell them how they had to tell me on their white boards. I got brilliant drawings, verbal explanations, and sentences. The final hard questions had idioms – tricky phrases in a small context or one sentence story. Here’s the thing – creating the questions was easy! I’m a teacher, I know tests and assessments. What I didn’t know were the logistics! My husband did all this math and calculation for me. Ha! “If you know how many questions and how much damage would happen to the boss if students were right 100% of the time, then…” Each team would send one student up for each question. That meant 3 students “against” me and my hard/fancy question.

• Rules: If they got the question right, they did “damage” to my beginning health/hit points. I was 70 HP to begin the game. Apparently, most bosses have more HP than the players/teams because it’s to be a challenge. If students got the question wrong, I got to do damage to their team or teams. Generally, a boss does more damage than players do. Their damage to me was -1 for each student. My damage to them was -2, but probably should have been -3 because they could heal with action cards. 28 questions, 3 teams of 6-7 students, with each student then getting to go 4 or more times. It was probably way too many questions for first graders – might be better in less questions like a quiz. We ended up having to use two parts of our day – but I will say they didn’t falter in their extreme love and desire to play.
• Power-ups or actions: Each student got to pick a power-up card before the game began. They chose this at random. There were 6 types of cards with varying levels of damage or healing. Types: deal additional damage to boss (fire ball symbol), deal damage to another team (sword symbol), deal “massive” damage to another team (plant eating person symbol), heal your team (bandaid symbol), bring in a “llama” friend to help… they wanted llamas and I found a way, and gadgets or tools (dictionary/thesaurus). If I had 6 types of cards and 20 students. I made each type have 4. That way one healing card might say +1, but another one would say +4. They absolutely loved this to begin the game. It was the point where you could see them begin to strategize. “We’re the damage team,” one student said as he looked at all the cards his team had gotten. The expectation of these cards were that you could play your card at anytime (no trading with your team). At the beginning of your turn, you must play the card before you see your question. If you get the answer right, then your card will go into effect. This made many cards a gamble. Use it and pray you get the question right so you can heal your team or damage the boss. However, getting a friend or “tool” to help were not dependent upon getting the answer right.
• Team XPs came into play before we began the game. These transformed into HP. For example, one team had 314 XP from all of the badges and positive behaviors during lessons. I made this their HP by dividing by 10. So, they went in with 31 HP against my boss with 70 HP. This added a layer because the work students put in during all of our lessons helped give their team an advantage in the boss battle.
• End Goal: Beat the boss. It didn’t matter what team you’re on – the class or Amelia Bedelias win if I am defeated and they’ve answered enough questions right to damage my score to zero. Big feat going from 70 to 0. But, as my husband would say, in perfect conditions – 3 players against me with each a right answer is 3 points of damage every time. Second smaller goal is to be like the MVP team – the team that’s kept the most HP. That team got sashes that I made with all of our badges from every single lesson. I made these sashes out of sentence strips and paper copied badges. Cheap! I also gave a sash to each individual student MVP from teams with lower points.
• Each student came up against me, listened to the question, and wrote their answer on a white board – waited to be shown until all were ready. Quite like the final question on jeopardy. No shouting out or getting mad that the teacher didn’t hear them answer first.

The “Amelia Bedelias” did in fact defeat me with 2 questions left to go. The team with the most HP to begin the battle ended up coming in second and the team that was second going into the battle came in first.

They thought about words! They were engaged in understanding what words mean in a powerful and playful way. They made mistakes. They healed their teams. They helped a friend or used a thesaurus even when it wasn’t their turn – they were flipping through studying it. They were whisper chanting and encouraging the players up against me. They strategized when to play their cards. They cheered when we were able to finish the game in the afternoon. They laughed at my costume as the feather boa was malting and I said, “It’s because you’re doing so much damage to me.” I walked away from my first gamified unit feeling complete and finally feeling like me again. Because teaching is so very linked to our passion, it’s also linked to our identity. Wearing that Fancy Nancy crown and watching my students succeed in a fun way, that’s who I want to be. I got a lot of comments that morning from former students (whom I love) saying I looked “overdone.” It was in fact crazy hair day for spirit week. I wasn’t sure how to take that word –overdone. But, I’ve decided I want to be overdone if it means our learning environment is transformed into a space where learning is not defined by structures and curriculum, but rather feelings/emotions, energy, and an electricity that ignites our lives.

At an IAG Conference, Sarah Reason taught me that there’s a difference between gamifying learning and game based learning. Gamifying allows you to add little parts of games that work to your content. Structures like badges. It’s the little changes to support engagement. From what I can tell, game based learning is the use of a full on game – like Oregon Trail to teach or train people in something. Gamifying allowed me to hone in on what I love about PBL in a manageable and simple way. Hooking learners in with a challenge or story, making the process of learning meaningful with badges, and being able to showcase the end of a unit/ learning in an authentic way.

The day after our boss battle, a student walked up to me and said, “Mrs. Lash, you’re back! We had a guest teacher yesterday – Fancy Nancy!” Transforming learning doesn’t have to be a classroom makeover or a Pinterest guru’s list of items to buy- on the smallest level it can be a costume and a teacher’s willingness to try something new.