William's Escapades Teaching Booklets
William's Escapades .mctemplate File
To use the resource you need to already have a Minecraft licence installed on your device. You can then upload our templates and play. For help with this, watch this short video.
Litcraft is proud to present its new Minecraft build made for Wordsworth, Grasmere and ready to take pride of place in the Museum and Education Centre at the grand re-opening of Dove Cottage in April 2021. This poetry-based resource focusses on Wordsworth’s “spots of time” – his memory of childhood experiences in and around the lake district as a boy. It also explores everyday life at Dove Cottage from Dorothy Wordsworth’s perspective. After reading different passages of poetry, children can undertake activities that relate to both the text and items in the Museum (e.g. read Wordsworth’s account of ice-skating at night. skate on the lake in Minecraft and then find the skates Wordsworth himself used). The base map of the Lake District was made for us by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford. The resource will also be trialled with local schools in Cumbria and is free to download here.
The core method for Litcraft is the same across all of our builds. The main aim of the resource is to re-engage children with literature by creating a positive loop between the experience of reading, the immersive experience within the game-world and the return to the text. Children follow instructions given at the starting point in a series of chests and readable books. They can also write in-game. Trials of the resource have clearly shown that Litcraft enhances comprehension, engagement and empathy with the main character in a first person text.
All of the lessons are structured in such a way that pre-reading and preparatory tasks warm up the children and prepare them for the in-game activity – then they enter the world and play the in-game task – then they come out and undertake a follow-up writing activity.
• Preparatory reading and vocab tasks
• IN GAME ACTIVITY [lasts around 30 minutes]
• Follow Up task
There are usually between 4-6 tasks for each world that correspond to key chapters and passages within the book. We recommend children working in PAIRS or THREES using the worlds on an ipad.
Litcraft has already been used in a range of ways:
• Whole class reader (read the text together and then use the resource for key lessons)
• Reading Intervention Groups (Litcraft as a way to re-engage reluctant readers)
• Libraries (we have a series of library partners who use it in school libraries and in main library events)
• SEN use – Litcraft works well with small groups