Snap
What is Snap?
Snap is an online version of the traditional card game. Students match words as they appear on the screen. As well as being fun, especially when students play against each other, the activities act to extend students' vocabulary, grammatical knowledge or their understanding of the vagaries of English spelling.
The principle is simple - the activity presents two words that have, or don't have, a specific relationship. It is impossible to play without thinking about the word's meaning. The relationship can be superficial (eg alliteration) or as complex as the designer wishes. You can even devise activities where the relationship between the sets of words is not overtly made plain and the players have to discover it.
The process involves the same sets of words coming up repeatedly, reinforcing a point of learning or embedding vocabulary items in pupils' minds. Snap has proved invaluable as an entertaining way to explore features of spelling listed in the Key Stage 3 National Strategy, such as the objective in the Year 7 Spelling Bank to "revise, consolidate and secure correct vowel choices, including ...the influence of vowels on other letters, eg softening c".
If you have access to a suite of computers, or you can borrow a digital projector, with or without an interactive whiteboard, Snap can be a simple but powerful tool in your Literacy kit.
How does Snap work?
It's very easy, as you'd expect! Try the simple starter activity to find out. Students can play against the computer but it's more fun with a partner. Players press a key when they think they spot a match - the Z key for Player 1, the M key for Player 2. Correct answers score a point - mistakes lose a point.
When the first player has reached a set number (usually 10 for Level 1), the activity moves up to the next level. There are at least two levels for each activity, sometimes more. Some activities will link to another activity once they are finished.
Ideas for using Snap - and literacy links
- Students play the colour synonym snap and then write descriptions using some of these colour words.
- The rhyme snap activities can be used to reinforce students' grasp of the number of ways of spelling the same sounds in English, such as the "rough/stuff" and "cheese/quays/breeze" rhymes in Rhymes 1.
- Alliteration snap can be used focus attention on the different ways of spelling the same sound, such as the hard/soft c sounds in "city/sister/cool" (not to mention the alliteration of "cyst" and "psychopath"!).
- You could even devise a snap activity without clues, in which students had to work out the links: are the words colours, foods, verbs - or do they alliterate?
Each of these ideas can use words from the English National Literacy Framework spelling list and so become part of your own literacy strategy.
Let us know of any ideas that occur to you for using Snap, especially for teaching aspects of literacy. Send in your comments and examples of students' work to englishonline@actis.co.uk.
