My Play Words
When learning a new list students should always open up 'My Play Words', the yellow banner in the middle of the screen.
They should then:
- Read the words, listen to them, and look at any photos accompanying the words to help give context
- Fundamentally important: students should study the list very carefully to focus on what the list is about, i.e. the learning intention. They should be the detective and work out why the words have been put together in one list. Unless it is a revision list or practice list, it will have some binding feature: a letter pattern, an auditory pattern that you can hear, a spelling rule, a set of prefixes, a set of suffixes, a grammatical connection, a vocabulary connection etc
There are sliders at the bottom of My Play Words.
Pupils can use the PHONICS slider if available to see and hear phonics splits. It will show you which letters work together to give a sound; dot for a single letter representing a sound and a dash for two or more letters.
Use the SPLIT WORDS slider to show any syllable splits. Syllable splits will largely be governed by open syllables with long vowels and closed syllables with short vowels.
Turning on VOWELS can be especially useful for long words.
Related Articles
When to use Set Work and Free Play
What are the benefits of 'setting work' vs 'automatic progression'? Many schools only use Wordshark in the automatic progression mode (AP/Supershark). Why not try exploring the Set Work option (using published lists or creating their own word lists). ...Student progress reports for Supershark (& Free Play)
Placement and progress in Supershark All students are given the baseline test (Shark Challenge) by default when they first log into the program, to find the appropriate Unit of work (out of 44 Units) to start at. They are then placed in Supershark - ...Free Play - Giving Students Access to all Courses
By default, 'Free Play' is switched 'off' As a teacher, you have access to all the courses. Students, by default do not, but if for any reason you want to allow your students freely to access any course (to ‘dip in’) (in addition to Supershark and/or ...Where to find Common Exception Words?
Common Exception words is the term that the National Curriculum uses for High Frequency Words and Tricky Words, and Alpha to omega calls Odd words! These words are embedded in the first 3 of our courses and gathered together in the High Frequency ...Letter to parents
Example letters to send to parents: Schools: Dear Parents We are pleased to let you know that your child will be given access to Wordshark Online from home. Wordshark is a computer program with a long track record of helping students improve their ...
Still need help?
We will get back to you as soon as we can.