Day 171 · What should your game do?
Resource Weeks 35–36 · Queensland Prep / national Foundation · flexible session, often 25–35 minutes with pauses. This is a resource sequence, not a school-term date claim.
Useful outcome
Create an own useful play job before a model. Materials: whole paper and usual communication; a game need not yet exist.
Before you start
Read Preparation, choose suitable available broad parts or a no-object route, and select C01 / C02 if useful. Keep first ideas before examples.
The session
- Invite a quiet self-use game, a pretend story choice or an own small challenge. Keep the purpose open; do not begin by handing out a finished adult board.
- Ask who/what the game is for and what a person would do. Save the child's first mark, arrangement or exact words. Rest/private planning can be the finish.
- Offer the selected mechanism below. Ask one useful question: “Where would someone start?” Do not fill in the child's purpose.
- After the first idea, show an unrelated ordinary adult example: broad cards labelled sun and rain can cue a pretend story choice. This is original fiction, not weather or a completed child's game.
- Invite one own feature or a different purpose. A helper may draw exactly as directed; name the actual marker separately.
- Retain the purpose and one open design question. If it remains vague, point to a proposed player action and ask what it would help them do next.
Choose an engagement route
- Sketch your path: On whole paper, draw an own route or arrangement. Point to the first player action and add or tell its job.
- Direct a cue maker: Choose two own story cues. Ask a willing helper to draw broad parts exactly as directed. Keep your words and their physical actions separately.
- Tell a game with no objects: Invent a described cue that starts an imagined action. Say/sign/use AAC for the start and one choice. No actual play is presumed.
Notice and teach next
Contexts: C01 choose an invented garden-path picture job; C02 make a quiet soundless pattern-choice job. Observe: an actual own purpose and idea, not a neat template. Next teaching: use an unrelated adult leaf-picture choosing example to separate 'a game' from 'choose a picture to start a story'; return to the child's idea without replacing it.
Child start · Home offer · Extra project
Whole visual and text alternative · Direct original SVG
Grown-up help
Offer speech, sign, AAC, pointing, drawing, faithful dictation, usual home-language support when competent, private work, pause, rest or finish. Ask one part at a time and keep its meaning. No partner, winner, score, time limit or fixed response length is required. Use only locally suitable broad whole paper/card, a checked marking tool and a stable comfortable table. A helper may act exactly as directed; keep the child's idea and the actual operator's action separate. Record an actual event only when it happened. A missing record can mean unknown; it does not establish that no action happened. A supplied story remains fiction.
Save an offered first idea before showing a worked example or a key. Record faithful access help separately from content/design help. Select only components actually taught and review exposure; the public forms are neither secure nor calibrated. Actual child making requires the child's own observed suitable action; adult manufacture is the adult's contribution. Actual familiar exploration is separate from interpreting a new fictional source. Never use response speed, handwriting, touch, compliance, sociability or length as design quality. These are original formative criteria, not official QCAA AP/MC/WW/EX/BA grading.
Modified from Prep alignment, Prep standard elaborations and Prep techniques and conditions, © State of Queensland (QCAA) 2023, CC BY 4.0 with item exceptions. Guidance summaries are adapted; proposed SubjectNest stories, choices, tasks, criteria and teaching moves are original. No endorsement.