ENGLISH VR CASE STUDY: Fly, Eagle, Fly (Student Age 7-8)
“Our Literacy learning was focused on stories with a moral. We had been reading ‘Fly, Eagle, Fly’ and were beginning to think about writing our own story with a focus on setting description. To inspire our own writing, we looked at the description of the Farmer and his friend climbing the mountain at the end of ‘Fly, Eagle, Fly’ – and what they saw below. The plan was for us to rewrite this description (and the ending of the story) with the children using powerful vocabulary and noun phrases to describe scenes from different countries in Africa.”
Michelle Quinlan
Age 7 – 8 Primary School Teacher (UK)
PRACTICAL SESSION
The children were in groups of three with one headset per group. I had created a playlist of photos and videos from different countries in Africa. Each member of the group had a different job; one child wore the ClassVR headset and used adjectives and nouns to describe what they saw; another child listened to the description and wrote down (on a provided template) the nouns and adjectives the first child said; the third child had a thesaurus, with which they would look up the adjectives that had been written down and find powerful synonyms. After a few minutes of the children talking and using the thesaurus, I sent the headsets to the waiting room. They would then work in their group to use the new synonyms to form a noun phrase to describe things that they they saw in the picture/video. We shared them as a class. The children then swapped jobs, looking at a different photo/video and creating more noun phrases to add to our working wall display.
IMPACT ON LEARNING
Every child was engaged, enthusiastic and achieving. The range of language used during the session was excellent and promoted great discussion on the effectiveness of different words to convey the right meaning. In particular, one reluctant writer, who had previously not been able to produce more than about half a page of writing due to his limited vocabulary, was extremely vocal, engaged and excited about describing what he saw. The piece of writing straight after that lesson involved applying those noun phrases to a new setting description and he did so independently and with pride – writing over a page and a half – which I put down to his enthusiasm from the headset session!
