The Purpose of the Learning Aid

I decided which learning aid to make for Henry by assessing his development and needs, so that I could find out where he needs help. I have tried to create a learning aid that will benefit all aspects of Henry’s development, but in particular his intellectual development. I decided on this because after discussions with both Henry and his parents, I have found out that he is very keen to learn to read and write. Henry has already begun to recognise letter shapes and sounds and I have decided that the best learning aid for me to make, would be one that builds on Henry’s current knowledge.

The learning aid will benefit Henry’s fine motor development, as he will be able to practice holding a pen in the correct position to write. He will also be able to practice his co-ordination, through manipulating the small cards and playing the different games such as snap and pairs, and also through writing on the cards.

The learning aid has been designed in particular, to develop Henry’s intellectual development; it will do this in a number of ways. The game will teach him new words and ideas, for example, the difference between being tired and lazy, and the difference between a cat and a kitten. The game will also help to teach him to recognise words; Henry will be able to recognise a picture and associate the written word with its meaning. This will help him to read the words when he doesn’t have the pictures to help him. The emphasis on the letters as components of the word, and not just the word as a whole will help Henry to write words by taking them one letter at a time, and the format of the game will help him to realise that one letter can be part of many different words and sounds.

The learning aid will help Henry’s language development as he will be able to experiment with the words and sounds and through hearing and saying them he will be able to incorporate them in to his own speech. By investigating concepts such as silent letters and long and short sounds, Henry will also advance.

Through the games Henry will learn to express emotions, such as pride at succeeding in the task and disappointment at not succeeding. This will benefit his emotional development. As the game can be played with other people, Henry will be able to learn how ...

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How is the Learning Aid Used?

There are a number of games that can be played with the learning aid.

Lotto. This can be played alone, or most likely with an adult or with other children. The large boards are shared out between the players. They take it in turns to pick a letter card from the bag and if it matches the letters on one of their boards, they can place it over the corresponding letter (if not it is returned to the bag). When the whole word is covered, the player can write each letter in the corresponding box underneath the picture.
Pairs and Snap. This game can be played with other children or an adult. The players can either match the picture cards or the letter cards.
Advanced Games. The child can pick a picture from the longer words and then spell it out using the letter cards. If playing with other children or an adult, one player can pick a picture card and can either tell the other person what the word is, or describe it, the second player must then spell out the word with the letter cards. This can also be done the other way round i.e. one player spells the word with the letter cards and the other has to produce the correct picture card. The child can also begin to write their own words and draw pictures to accompany them.

Justification of the Learning Aid Design

I made this particular game for Henry for a number of reasons. In particular, to build on the reading and writing skills he is beginning to learn at nursery; both Henry and his parents are keen to advance this skill and this is the sort of toy that I have seen aimed at children of Henry’s age. Henry sometimes has trouble concentrating on one thing, so by giving him a game that a) he is interested in, b) is diverse and can be used in many different ways, c) helps him to use his imagination and d) is long enough that he doesn’t complete it too quickly but is not so long that he gets bored, I hope to improve his concentration skills. I also designed the learning aid so that it would help Henry to show his emotions and deal with them in a healthy way, as this will be an important skill later in life.

I made this particular design for the learning aid for a number of reasons. I made this game as it would help Henry’s development and it was suitable for a chid of his age (I found this out by looking at games currently on the market). I also thought that Henry would enjoy this type of game. The material and resource costs were within my budget and the design was simple and manageable within the time scale I had allowed. I used bright colours and designs to capture Henry’s attention and imagination and I used hardwearing materials that were easy to clean. I chose to produce the cards on the computer, as I knew that I had good IT skills, access to suitable software and it would look professional. I made the bag to keep the pieces in, as I know that Henry often loses pieces of his games, and the bag is also useful to pick pieces from in a number of the games.

An Evaluation of the Learning Aid

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of my learning aid, I have identified a number of success criteria.

Henry must be able to successfully match 3 out of 4 of the letter shapes with their positions on the large cards after 30 minutes. (I expect that he may have trouble with similar shapes such as b, d, p, q etc)
The learning aid must be enjoyable for Henry to play with.
The learning aid must hold Henry’s attention for 30 minutes (this is a little longer than Henry’s usual attention span.)
The learning aid must be able to develop as Henry does. I have ensured this by giving some more advanced tasks to complete after Henry becomes more confident and advanced.
The learning aid must teach Henry to recognise at least 15 letters of the alphabet and to be able to write 10 letters, after 10 attempts.

I observed Henry playing with the learning aid on five occasions. I also left the learning aid with Henry and asked his parents to observe him for a further five occasions.

Henry was able to match nearly all of the letters with their positions on the large cards after one 40-minute session. Each new occasion Henry made a few mistakes on the first few attempts but improved as he practiced, Henry made fewer mistakes on each occasion that he played the game.

Henry enjoyed playing with the learning aid; he enjoyed having the diversity to play different games but still be learning. He also enjoyed it because he could play with his friends and family. When I asked his views on the game Henry said “It was good… I liked it because it was fun and I played with Monique (his older sister).”

On average, Henry played with the game for around 40 minutes at a time. This was better than I predicted and is definitely a strength of the game.

By the last few occasions that Henry was observed he was beginning to find the simple games easier. Even by the last attempt Henry was not ready to move on to the more advanced tasks, as he is still not able to recognise the word as a whole. This is both a strength and a weakness; it is a weakness because the game could take a while to produce advanced results, however it is a strength as it means that the game will last for a longer period of the child’s life and will guide them through a number of skills.

After 10 attempts Henry could recognise 11 letters of the alphabet and he could write 8. This means that the learning aid did not teach Henry some skills as fast as I thought it would. However I think these criteria were not met because they were a little unrealistic. I think that if left for longer, Henry would meet these criteria after a few more attempts.

Henry’s parents said that the learning aid was a success. Jean said that she thought Henry had learnt a lot from the game, she said he had found it more fun than many other similar teaching games, which he quickly loses interest in. She said “ I think that he enjoyed it because he thought he was just paying around, he finds other similar games boring because the focus is on results rather than fun.” She also said that it would have been better if there had been more focus on writing as well as reading.

Taking all of this in to account I have thought of a few improvements I could make to my learning aid.

In order to extended the game further I could add more pictures and more of the longer words. This would help Henry’s intellectual development, as he would be learning longer words. I also think that there could be more emphasis on writing the words. I would also make the cards larger as they were easy to lose and larger cards would be easier for Henry to hold.