Classroom Implementation Guide & Mini Lesson Plans
Beach Week opens the school year, so for most classes this is the first Wormly session ever. Tap each item as you finish it — nothing here takes more than a minute.
Wormly's boxes are shaped by letter morphology, so the box tells students something before they spell: tall boxes for ascenders (b, d, f, h, k, l, t), hanging boxes for descenders (g, j, p, q, y), and standard boxes for everything mid-height. Type any word to see what students will see — or use it to draw boxes on your whiteboard during the preview phase.
Letters only — the game's word bank has no hyphens or spaces. This is the same shape logic the K–1 lesson plan asks you to model with SHELL on the board.
| Time | Phase | Teacher does | Students do |
|---|
Each word carries its SoR construct and a difficulty tier assigned by syllable and morpheme count — not by feel. Search a word to find which band it lives in, or filter to build a focused small-group list.
| Word | Band | Focus | Construct | Tier |
|---|
A session is five words. Students steer Wormly with arrow keys, mouse drag, or finger, collect the glowing letters, then drag them from the tray into the boxes. Correct placements glow; wrong ones shake. After five words, a Mission Report shows time, attempts, and errors per word.
Child strip — a celebratory, kid-facing summary of the words they spelled, styled like a shoreline ticket.
Teacher strip — the formative data: grade level, date, accuracy rate, per-word time, attempts and errors, which letters were confused, plus a QR code back to the full digital record.
Correct-word audio feedback (“Great job! You spelled the word…”) now plays for Beginner and K–1, reinforcing orthographic mapping for the youngest readers.
Names: records never contain student names, which keeps them FERPA-safe by design. Add a token or name by hand before filing, or rename the saved file — JM03-beachweek-2026-08-11.
Background music plays during active gameplay and toggles off in the upper right corner of the game.
Success and error sounds play independently of that toggle. For sensory-sensitive students or silent work periods, mute the device before handing it out — the game is fully playable with no sound at all.
The record gives you four data points per word: time on task, attempts, errors, and which letters got confused. Pick what you're seeing and get the next instructional move.
| Signal | May indicate | Next step |
|---|---|---|
| 0 errors per word | Strong orthographic mapping | Introduce stretch words from the next band up |
| 1–2 errors per word | Decoding with some uncertainty | Review the specific phoneme or pattern flagged in the error log |
| 3+ errors per word | Pattern not yet secured | Pre-teach the SoR pattern before replay; consider the prior band |
| Long time, low errors | Effortful but accurate decoding | Fluency practice with the word in context sentences |
| Short time, high errors | Guessing without attending to letters | Return to letter-by-letter phoneme mapping activities |
Beach Week supports explicit instruction in the Reading Foundations (RF) and Language (L) strands.
| Standard | Strand | Connection |
|---|---|---|
| RF.K.3 · RF.1.3 | Phonics & word recognition | Beginner and K–1 lists target short vowels, vowel teams, blends, and digraphs — mapped in the Focus column of the word bank. |
| RF.2.3 · RF.3.3 | Phonics & word recognition | The 2–3 list applies multisyllabic decoding and consonant-doubling patterns to high-interest coastal vocabulary. |
| L.K.2 · L.1.2 | Spelling | The mechanic requires accurate letter placement, reinforcing orthographic mapping through immediate feedback. |
| L.2.4 · L.3.4 | Vocabulary | 2–3 suffixes (-y, -er, -ing) and compound words are explicitly tagged and surfaced during gameplay. |
| L.4.4 · L.5.4 | Vocabulary | The 4–5 list targets Latin roots (habit-, predat-, circul-, sediment-) for morpheme-level analysis. |
| L.3.4b–d | Morphology | The spiral design (sun and sand repeated Beginner → K–1) supports morpheme and pattern deepening across bands. |