Key points:

• Gamification can encourage students to take ownership of their learning
• Game-based learning promotes creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in an immersive digital environment
• See related article: Digital tools are sticking around–here’s the right way to leverage technology
• For more news on gamification, visit eSN’s Digital Learning page

Students don’t have to be video game fanatics to appreciate a gamified classroom lesson. When teachers turn a lesson or tough-to-teach concept into a motivational gamed or use a fun competition to teach new concepts, students become immersed in their learning and are often more engaged–meaning they’re more likely to retain information.

Still, there’s an art to gamifying a lesson and ensuring that students are actually learning instead of just playing a game for points.

Here’s how educators across the country are using tools–from Minecraft: Education Edition to Roblox and easy-to-access online resources–to gamify their lessons and help students engage with learning.

1. Carrie Rosenberg, a fourth grade teacher at Community Christian School, notes that gamification is one of the biggest education trends right now. According to ISTE, “gamification is about transforming the classroom environment and regular activities into a game.” Many students want more than just good grades from school–they want something physical or immediate. Rosenberg uses Gimkit, Kahoot!, and Prodigy to gamify her instruction and motivate students. Learn more about her instructional strategies.

2. Games are part of many people’s lives–so why not use them to benefit students when teaching? Abigail Beran, a fifth grade teacher enrolled in a masters program in education technology, knows that her students are more likely to engage in an educational activity when it is gamified–and that they’re even more likely to do so when the activity is gamified with technology. There are a variety of reading and math apps and websites that cater to gamification, and even provide the opportunity for differentiation. Beran uses tools including Raz Kids, Dreamscapes, Prodigy English, and IXL language arts for English/language arts gamification, and uses Prodigy Math, Math Playground, Pet Bingo, Sushi Monster, and IXL math for gamifying math. Discover how she integrates these gamified tools into her classroom.

3. As an educator for more 27 years and a digital learning specialist (social studies) for the past 7 years in Atlanta Public Schools, Felisa Ford has supported educators across the district and beyond as they purposefully integrate technology in the classroom to promote engagement and 21^st century skill development. While there are many tools and resources available to educators to support their efforts to create dynamic digital learning environments, one of the most engaging is Minecraft Education Edition (M:EE). Popular among students (and teachers!), M:EE is a game-based learning platform that promotes creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in an immersive digital environment. Read about five ways Ford has helped the district’s teachers use M:EE into classroom instruction.

Key points:

• Immersive opportunities make high frequency words stick and keep students engaged
• Mastering high frequency words helps students grow into proficient readers
• See related article: How efficacy studies improve literacy instruction
• For more news on literacy, visit eSN’s Innovative Teaching page

If you were to poll an audience of educators–classroom teachers, literacy specialists, reading researchers, and university professors–about whether high frequency words should be taught in early elementary, the resounding answer would be YES. These words, after all, are important to students’ ultimate reading success.

The nuances of teaching high frequency words in early elementary would only arise around how these words should be taught.

Luckily, there is a plethora of best practice research and engaging, tech-enabled activities on teaching high frequency words to help teachers make it both a fun and interesting learning experience for young students.

Understanding high frequency words

Before teaching about high frequency words, it is important to understand how they differ from sight words. While these categories of words are often used interchangeably and can cross pollinate, high frequency words are words that appear most frequently in spoken and written language. Sight words, on the other hand, are those words that students recognize by sight–without the need to stop and decode the word–when reading.

For example, “the” is a high frequency word as well as a sight word for many people. “Email” is not a high frequency word, but is often a sight word. Classmates’ names often become sight words for students. Kindergarten students who are still emergent readers during the first semester will quickly learn their name by sight, as well as their classmates’ names (…and, they often get a great sense of satisfaction when recognizing and reading each other’s names!)

When it comes to choosing the actual words that are considered high frequency words, the educational community has embraced three different lists of words: the Dolch, Zeno, and Fry high frequency word lists. These lists have many shared words, and there is no research that says one list supersedes the other. Any of the lists or teaching a combination of the lists should still help produce successful readers.

Strategies for teaching emerging readers high frequency words

There are hundreds of ways to teach high frequency words and the majority of those ways fall into two instructional categories: memorization and phonics integration.

Both of these instructional strategies lead to students learning and quickly recalling many, many words–both high frequency words and sight words–with automaticity. This is called orthographic mapping, which is essentially a progression of warehousing words permanently in a student’s memory for immediate retrieval.

With memorization, teachers can create fun–and effective–learning opportunities for students as long as a few rules are applied. First, it is important to eliminate distractions so that the focus is on the high frequency word. Distractions can include other words printed around the target word, and having accompanying pictures with a word. For example, a picture of a girl in a swing holding her cat can be distracting when the target word is “with.”

It is also important for teachers to say the high frequency word clearly multiple times and to put the word in a sentence for contextual understanding. Providing students with the opportunity to write the word, so they are making the physical connection to the spoken word, is also important.  

There are a number of digital flashcard apps teachers can use to help students memorize high frequency words. The flashcards can also be shown to the whole class using projectors or interactive displays as part of a whole group activity.

Creating “sounds walls” in the classroom–whether on a bulletin board or digital display–highlighting four to five high frequency words is another great way to help students visualize, practice, and memorize target words. Each week, the words can be swapped out with new ones for them to learn.

Another strategy for teaching high frequency words is through integrating the words into phonics lessons. It will help if teachers pick high frequency words that integrate with the phonics skills they are covering. For example, when teaching the phonic element /s/, it can be valuable to include the high frequency word “said,” even if the vowel irregularity of /ai/ hasn’t been taught yet. If students are learning /s/ and maybe even /d/, they will be excited and motivated to apply this knowledge to learning and remembering a new word.

With either memorization or phonics integration, teachers can play a quiz game with students in which teams compete to come up with answers to questions about high frequency words. Or, they can have students participate in racetrack-style board games where two or more players move markers along the spaces of a path from start to finish. At each stop, the player must read a word and use it correctly in a sentence in order to stay on that space. Technology, whether through the use of apps or student devices, can easily be incorporated into both of these game-based activities to make the experiences even more engaging.

Regardless of which instructional strategy is used to teach high frequency words, it is important that students are immersed and active participants in the learning experience. This means that students should be hearing, saying, reading and writing high frequency words consistently within foundational lessons. These immersive opportunities are what make the words stick and what keep students engaged. And, it’s the ultimate mastery of high frequency words that will enable young students to grow into proficient readers.