8. Curriculum Use for Individual, Small Groups, Entire Classrooms
Clever Crazes for Kids™ offers a variety of engaging educational gaming experiences for students that can be used as a great way to motivate learning within the K-8 classroom. CCK can be used for enrichment, remediation, and differentiation of learning for students within the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) content areas.
Our classroom implementation guide will provide strategies that teachers can use within the 9 Worlds of CCK to integrate the internetbased, technology and animation rich resource into teaching elementary and middle school STEM disciplines.
There are three (3) main ways that Clever Crazes can be used in the K-8 classroom:
1. Whole group instruction - Clever Crazes can be used as a way to bring inquiry into the classroom through engaging students in one or more of the 9 worlds aligned with concepts to be taught - prior to any instruction in that area. Allow students to explore the worlds, play the games, read the facts, answer the questions and engage in the other activities on the site. The teacher can also use a SmartBoard or other means of projecting the site on the board and walk students as a whole group through CCK.
2. Small group instruction - CCK offers a great opportunity for teachers to set up learning centers where small groups of students can explore and use CCK for enrichment and remediation - reaching a variety of different types of learners on many levels of learning.
3. Individual instruction - In addition to learning in groups, Clever Crazes is also very well suited for meeting the needs of individual students. CCK is easy to use and can be a way of individualizing instruction for students who are in need of additional reinforcement to gain mastery of a concept or for those who have mastered the content and are ready to learn more.
In addition to the fantastic opportunities for learning within the CCK website including educational gaming - CCK has also developed a series of STEM problem-based learning units aligned with each of the 9 Worlds called CCK STEM Expeditions which are designed for use within grades 5-8 and K-4. Each CCK STEM Expedition has a full curriculum including lesson plans, essential questions, goals and objectives for each day of the five-day unit. Each year nine themes grounded within the nine worlds will be chosen and corresponding CCK STEM Expeditions for each grade band K-2, 3-5, and 6-8 are developed using a spiral approach to building student understanding of the concept that can be introduced in K-2, built upon in 3-5 and further mastered in grades 6-8.
Problem-based learning begins with presenting students with a challenge, question, or scenario that they work in teams to investigate, collect and analyze data, formulate conclusions using evidence and propose a solution or answer to the problem grounded in their data and knowledge of the real-world.
