Arcademic Skill Builders

Arcademic Skill Builders promise the following:

Arcademic Skill Builders are research-based and standards-aligned educational games that offer an innovative approach to teaching basic academic skills. We incorporate features of arcade games and educational practices into fun online games that will engage, motivate, and teach your students.

Play games for free right here on our site! Click a button below to play. We have multi-player and single player games. In the future we'll add features enabling you to save records, tailor content for differentiated instruction, and pinpoint student problem areas!

The few games I played were fun, in that competitive way. The number facts questions would suit lower levels, but the ratio questions are definitely for higher level students (I felt very challenged!!).

The mutliplayer games mean that students can play against others in their class or against others in the world. There are also single player games for the less competitive.

The games are a chance to reinforce internet safety rules as well, as children have the opportunity to use their own user name or a randomly generated one. While it gives their name, there are no other identifiers (eg country, age).

Categories include addition & subtraction games, multiplication & division games, fraction & ratio games, language art games (eg verbs, vowels, capitals).

While not printable, there is feedback about percentage correct and the questions that were wrong. A teacher could take a screen dump for each child's game if a record was needed.

Read Write Think

Read Write Think has a lot of useful tools for making writing fun in the classroom. The visuals are the sort that would usually appeal to children and teachers will like that each tool also includes a list of ways for using the tools in class activities. Each of the links below will take you to the activities pages which then contain the links for the teaching tool.

The Letter Generator

The Letter Generator is a useful tool for students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters containing all the essential elements needed for both styles of correspondence.

Animal Inquiry

Supporting inquiry-based research projects, the Animal Inquiry interactive invites elementary students to explore animal facts and habitats using writing prompts to guide and record their findings. This is a good introductory activity for students before writing information reports. It would work well as an IWB activity when working on a joint construction.

Comic Creator

The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on). The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on). This would be perfect for introductory cartooning or simple conversation writing for younger grades.

There are many other useful tools at the site, and a list of the rest of them can be found HERE