Transcript

This game is called Runaway Robots. I designed it to help student's ages six through eight develop their phonemic awareness skills and decoding skills. The goal of this game is to collect all of the robot body parts in order to create your own robot. There are different versions of the game but the simplest version is to just create a mix and match robot. In the center of the game there will be pieces of a robot for students to choose from. In order for students to be able to take those pieces of the robot, they need to pick up from the pile that matches the color of the coin that they picked up.

Students have four different cards to choose from. There's the yellow pile, the green pile, the blue pile and the red pile. Beginning with the yellow cards, these are three-letter words with short vowel sounds in the middle. Students read the word and gain points.

With the red deck, students need to read and then rhyme a word with it. Even silly words, nonsense words are fine. 

The blue cards are where students need to use the sounding-out strategy to help them read short-vowel words.

The green pile is worth 40 points. These are four letter words, again with short-vowel sounds in them, but students will identify a strategy that works best for them.

Creating your own board game doesn't have to be difficult. You can take an existing board game and cover it with a piece of Bristol board in your choice of color. You can use spinners from other board games and just place Bristol board on top and write in your own positions. These come from an existing board game already, but you can also create your own coins. In order to create different cards you can use an easy template from Microsoft Word. As for the robots, you can use pieces of Lego, using different colors in order to create the robots that your students are going to build as they play the game.