The PC game that led to better writing and greater output

[Jill]

My ds has never taken to handwriting. His printing is actually very neat and beautiful and we are working through HWOT's cursive books in English and Spanish this year and his handwriting is lovely but it is physically challenging for him and his perfectionism means he gets frustrated if it's not "just so." We have kept at it and also followed a lot of suggestions here for allowing oral output where I wrote things for him in past years.

 

This year it's a little different. :) He received the PC game "Spore" sometime in the last year. The game, besides having a particular challenge to win, also has a creative mode where you create not only your own creations (creatures, buildings, spaceships, etc...) but your own worlds and your own adventures. Within these adventures you can write dialog between various creatures. (It's a little bit comparable to Alice with a richer interface and a bit more automation.) During the summer, we did let him play rather a lot of it but only if he used proper punctuation and grammar when writing the dialog for his adventures. He had to use us or the dictionary to check spelling ("Did I spell 'evolutionarily' correct, Mama?" I had to check if the adverb form was correct...) and his spelling has improved by leaps and bounds though it wasn't really a problem for him before.

 

The result was that his typing improved by a large margin over the summer and he can now write multi-paragraph stories and essays without becoming completely overwhelmed and fatigued. It's exciting for both of us. I have him doing much of his spelling, Latin vocabulary work and composition on the computer. There are still worksheets and the handwriting books to work on but less hair-pulling over the other things contributes to much better school days now. I just thought I'd share. typing games were of little interest to him but being able to write these stories and have his characters act them out was motivating!

Edited September 28, 2011 by Jill