2018 VATE Conference: We Are The Change

In this interactive workshop, we will share two original board games we have created and used to support middle and high school students during the writing process.  We will begin by sharing our objectives for using game-based learning in the ELA classroom. Games can serve as a method to motivate and engage students in academic literacies. They do so by drawing on adolescents' natural interest in and enjoyment of games. We will provide an overview of the two writing units during which these games were situated: a spoken word poetry unit and a unit on creating written arguments. We will then invite participants to play the games (Box of Chocolates and Race to the White House) and then reflect on how they might use or adapt these games for their own classrooms.