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English Online GameZone
Pros: The site covers a nice variety of English language-related content.
Cons: Games are simple, but many but have overly complicated rules.
Bottom Line: The site gives kids the opportunity to practice otherwise dry material, but games could benefit from an update, simplification, and learning supports.
You may want to assign specific games to give kids practice in concepts recently covered in class, which could be a fun way to do drill practice or enhance vocabulary. Since there's no way to record what kids are doing, you can't monitor progress or performance. Games might work best as an assignment in a computer lab or at an in-class computer station so that you can walk around and check on kids. You can encourage kids to explore concepts they don’t know and build lessons around vocab and parts of speech.
English Online GameZone is a website that offers a list of links to games that address English-language topics (vocabulary, grammar, spelling, common usage). When kids hover their mouse over any game title, they can read what the game addresses and its target level. Games explore topics such as suffixes and prefixes, constructing sentence, verbs, similes, vocabulary, spelling and more. Some games allow kids to choose from multiple levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced). In two "mega" games, kids progress through an adventure as they pass multiple levels.
Learning about grammar isn't always very exciting, and these games do provide a nice way to let kids have fun exploring and practicing some otherwise dry material. The topic variety is vast, and there are even some very specific grammar drills to work on, like finding abstract nouns and action prepositions in sentences.
However, the site was clearly designed several years ago and has an outdated look and feel, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn't combined with often complicated and confusing rules. Each game has an intro explanation that isn't always clear, and without in-game support, kids may forget the rules and steps to follow. This is also a missed opportunity for some nice teaching moments: Games are mostly drills for knowledge that kids must already possess before playing. For example, it would be nice to see definitions and examples of abstract nouns and action prepositions integrated into the play experience.
Learning Rating
A collection of simple vocabulary and grammar review games.
These games are so simple that students will quickly lose interest unless there is additional encouragement/competition in the classroom. They were all at a pretty low level of Bloom's Taxonomy, too.
I did like the variety of games. If I taught ELL or maybe upper elementary, several of these games would be of greater use.