The first week has finished and looking over my lesson plans and the responses they got it appears a few things are going correctly.
The week mostly consisted of discussing games and Bloom’s Taxonomy. We also played about 3 rounds of Are You a Werewolf over the course of a couple days with ample breaks to discuss strategy. After a wolf strikes in the night we would pause and have everyone mentally make a prediction as to who was eliminated. Then I would show who was eliminated and ask the students to hypothesize who might have chosen the people eliminated so far based upon many factors (eg. friends, not friends, proximity, is that kid annoying). Overall it really had the kids thinking a good deal more about their strategies.
The session reports they read about the games were, for the most part, great. Several were kind of weak and wouldn’t have scored highly based upon the rubric. However, a couple students volunteered to read theirs and they were both insightful and showed shrewd awareness of tactics. We may have some budding politicians on our hands!
We also introduced two Treehouse pieces games. We played Tic-Tac-Doh! and Drip. Both games were a hit and Drip especially got a good deal of laughter and excited playing out of all the kids. Drip was particularly good because it had a little strategy but a bit of luck as well. This allowed my lower functioning students to be competitive with my most gifted kids and win several of the games. The looks on their faces was priceless and made teaching the game worthwhile. Hopefully of the next few weeks we will explore the Icehousegames wiki a little more.
I am excited for the next two weeks. The third week of class we begin playing Go. I’m extremely excited to introduce the kids to this ancient game and look forward to seeing an entire classroom poring over the goban.
