11 awesome ways Night Zookeeper develops reading and writing skills!

Night Zookeeper was designed to inspire a love of reading and writing in children, while at the same time helping to develop their creative thinking skills, as well as genuinely improving the quality of their writing.

Here are eleven awesome ways Night Zookeeper could do this for your child!

1. Creating A Magical Animal

As a Night Zookeeper, one of your child’s most important tasks is create their own animals to live in the Night Zoo! This is the perfect chance for them to use their imaginations and creative writing skills to first, draw their animal, and then to write a report all about it.

They’ll be asked questions to help them write as much as they can about their creation and given writing goals to achieve in their animal report. In the Night Zoo, the more imaginative the animal the better!

2. Writing Challenges With “Goals” And “Plans”

Every long writing challenge in Night Zookeeper gives children “goals” to achieve that will reward them with points in the game. The goals are age-specific and are there to help children think more deeply about their writing. If they don’t reach their goals they will be able to see where they need to edit their work in order to achieve them!

3. Sharing their work and Personalised Feedback from Tutors

Our tutors publish the most interesting and unique writing to the team blog. All children can view the writing, and leave comments. Children love having the opportunity for their work to be showcased.

Peer feedback: Children can leave feedback on other children’s writing, and there is a helpful comment suggestion tool to assist in thinking about how they should comment. This is a great way to help them improve each others writing skills.

They can even follow their friends so that they can easily find new writing and leave encouraging comments to each other.

There is no direct chat, and all comments are moderated and approved by our team of educators.

Tutoring Feedback: Children receive feedback on every piece of writing that they complete from our team of tutors. This may be simply identifying spelling and punctuation mistakes, asking follow up questions, or showing other ways that they could improve their writing. The tutors always provide positive encouragement.

Children receive extra rewards if they go back and edit their work, which is a great motivation for them to really analyse their own writing, and continue to improve it.

4. Fun challenges that build vocabulary, spelling, reading, grammar and punctuation skills

Our curriculum of challenges are age-specific and designed to make learning the basics of reading and writing fun and engaging. Children play through a variety of quizzes. The more correct answers they get, the more points they acquire, and more they can power up the animals they create.

Our program understands the areas that children need to improve and will serve up challenges again that the child does not easily complete.

5. Sentence Writing Challenges

As students grow their Night Zoo they will start receive mini sentence writing tasks. All of the challenges require students to include the following criteria:

1. Use a capital letter to open the sentence
2. Use end punctuation, such as: . ! ? …
3. Include at least five words with correct spacing.
4. Include the specific writing goal.
5. The specific goal might be to use a new word correctly in a sentence, such as the example below, or to rearrange a sentence so it is grammatically correct. All student’s answers are marked automatically and they will be rewarded for meeting all the goals.

These tasks are great at helping students to start building longer sentences, using new vocabulary, and in boosting their general typing skills. They are lot of fun too!

6. Weekly, Engaging Lessons

Twice a week your child will receive a lesson from our tutors that is designed to get them writing. The subject may be topical, such as ‘Penguin Awareness Day’, or it may be based on a specific skill, such as learning how to write persuasively, or how to include more adverbs in their writing.

7. Reading Comprehension

Children will also encounter challenges that require them to read text or short passages and then answer questions on them. The more correct answers they get, the more orbs they receive and the more they can power up the animals that they create.

8. Vocabulary Games

Children can play exciting games with the animals that they create, that are designed to improve their spelling, vocabulary, sentence building and typing skills.

Each week our global leaderboard inspires children to try to achieve the very best score they can.

9. Writing Awards

It’s great to reward children for the effort that they make! On Night Zookeeper, children can win awards for all the different kinds of writing they produce. If they write a poem, they get a “Poetry Award”, or if they write more than 500 words, they get the “500 word” award.

All of these awards give them points to continue growing their zoo, a great way to motivate children not only to write a lot, but also to reward them for attempting different styles of writing.

10. Competitions!

We run regular competitions on Night Zookeeper throughout the whole year, with real-world prizes.

These can be great motivators for children who might initially be reluctant to start writing

11. Creative drawing and writing challenges

We love getting imaginations flowing by asking questions that really make children think differently, such as “Can you draw the ocean without the colour blue?” or “Imagine what a tennis-playing frog would look like.”

Night Zookeeper is packed full of these kinds of challenges, giving children fun, imaginative topics to express their artistic skills and creative writing ability with.

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