Providing encouragement to students

Providing encouragement to students

Discuss some major incentives!

  1. Being able to confidently read books, comics etc
  2. To be able to write - skills also needed for tests/exams

'Ocean Scene' Stickers

Students can buy stickers in their Ocean Scene using the coins they've earned playing the Wordshark games. (Only accessible via the student's dashboard.) There are 3 ways to see how this works: Click here to read more, create a pretend student and sign in as them, or watch a student access their 'Ocean Scene'.

Reward games

After playing 3 learning games, the student is offered a reward game.

Achievement Certificates

There are four designs to choose from and each pdf contains 2 x A5 certificates. Click here to see the options

Time spent on Wordshark at school/home 

Click here for a downloadable 'logged in and games played' tick chart.

Here are a few examples of ways to use Wordshark:
    1. Example 1: use Wordshark for 15 minutes (3 times a week or more)
    2. Example 2: ask students to make a note of each game played, aiming for at least 3 games per session (3 times a week or more)
    3. Example 3: the minutes on Wordshark can approximately reflect the age of the student, so a 7 year old would do around 7 minutes, every day or maybe Monday-Friday
If you have set them work you will have also requested that it's completed by a certain date. You may need to give them an idea of how many lists you have set them to help them manage their time i.e. they can work out how often they need to use Wordshark.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3













How students can see their progress
  1. Students can go to the 'My progress' tab to see how they are doing, - or the 'Set work' tab if they have been set work.

  2. Pupils also receive a weekly pop-up if they completed any work in the previous week up to midnight on Sunday (UK Time). This shows:

  1. an overview of their Supershark course
  2. the total time spent playing all games for all modes of work
  3. all the words spelt accurately during that week across all modes of work, including own lists
Parents can look up progress if they want:  Click here to see how 

Encouragement from the teacher or parent
  1. Early on in using Wordshark, and from time to time thereafter, talk to students about why using Wordshark is important. Ask them to approach a teacher if they feel that they are working on words that are too difficult or too easy for them. Wordshark can be adjusted to meet their needs!
  2. Can they think of a way to reward themselves when they've met their daily or weekly target such as completing a list of words - or agree with a family member what the reward could be.
Creating lists for your students
  1. Preparing your own word lists may take a little longer but is great for engaging students in a subject that they like, or connecting Wordshark to class topic work.

Homework and involving family

Ask your students if they can think of a set time and place where they can access the program for their sessions on Wordshark. If they are easily distracted or there is background noise, ask if they have any headphones that they can use.

Parental/family involvement can be key especially if time isn't normally allocated to Wordshark during the school day. 
  1. Encourage family members also to ask the student about their favourite games.
  2. For a change, encourage students to ask someone in the family to take part. A parent or sibling can read out the words in ‘my play words’ to see if your student can write them down.
  3. Then play a spell check game and see how many they get right (practise this in a lesson if you have direct contact online with your student.)
  4. Parents/carers can:
    1. talk about the words being learned (listed in 'my play words')
    2. and talk about their favourite games too.


Blogs that may be useful:
The need for structure – wherever and whenever we learn