What’s ICT Games?

ICT Games (Information and Communications Technologies Games) provides games to teach elementary reading and mathematics; however, the reading games are also appropriate for children learning English as a second language.

What ICT Games Does Well

The games on ICT Games are both fun and well-focussed on specific learning objectives. There are a lot of games that help children practice spelling, basic letter sounds, and blends (combinations of letters that produce a single sound).

One of the strengths of ICT Games is that many of the basic actions in the alphabet games trigger associated sounds. This gives children still learning to read important practice remembering which sounds go with which letters.

What Needs Work

I would love to see animated stories to complement the games both in theme and learning objectives, but each game can be used to practice several different learning objectives so this is not realistic.

So, how about more of a good thing.

How to Use ICT Games

Each game can be used to practice a number of different things so you will probably want to help your child choose what to practice when she plays. To do this, you will also want to make sure you know what your child is learning in class.

The site is fairly easy to navigate so a child can probably choose games on her own, but she won’t get the most from this site without some parental input.

My Favourite

As a teacher, there is not a lot to choose between the games—they are all quality educational tools. But, since we’re picking favourites, I like the Blending Dragon game because it plays quickly and looks cool.

To play the Blending Dragon game, you select the type of blend that you would like to practice and then bubbles appear from one side of the screen with words trailing behind them. You control the dragon as it tries to eat the bubbles with real words and leave the bubbles with nonsense words.

The Verdict

Once your child knows the alphabet, ICT Games is definitely worth a few visits.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 10:06 pm and is filed under English, EFL, ESL, Reviews, Children's English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.