Today's #FunFactFriday post is written by Colleen Graves who actually writes the majority of these blog posts! LOL! But today is a reprisal post from her blog where she blogged about maker projects before coming to Makey Makey as our Director of Communications, Community, and Creative Content. 

Inspiration

A few years ago, I created a sound word game with one of my favorite Piggie and Gerald books, Pigs Make Me Sneeze. Around the same time, I saw a post from Tom Heck in the Makey Makey Educator group where participants in his workshop created an invention that helps young students learn new words. It was a serendipitous a-ha moment for me! I made my own interactive word board so that my kinder kids could be empowered to play the sight word matching game on their own! It's been a project I've shared with educators ever since!

Today I wanted to share it as our Fun Fact Friday post for any educators that are looking for some Friday inspiration!

Gaining Confidence

When I made this project, was able to watch some of my kinder kids who were still getting the hang of reading sight words find confidence in becoming self sufficient by utilizing the word wall. Watch them use the sound board to find the right matches below.

Scratch Game

In case you are interested, here is the Scratch Game that I created to play the sounds. I went a little overboard making the words pop-up, but it was a fun Scratch challenge for me to attempt having my word only appear for a short time, and then go back to the Scratch cat.

Make Your Own!

This really isn't hard to make! Just use brass fasteners and code key presses in Scratch or use our Interactive Poster app to have words and sounds display for each site word. Here's a tutorial I made before the Scratch update, but it is still the exact same coding!

Last Note – Empower the teachers- empower the learners…

While it is cool for teachers to make their own manipulatives, it is even cooler when students can use these ideas in their own projects. One year I had 5th graders create interactive literacy games for their reading buddies. You can challenge your own students with this guide from that challenge.

Let us know what you and your students Makey Makey with this idea!

Colleen Graves

Director of Communications, Community, and Creative Content