Showing posts with label gifted. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gifted. Show all posts

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Hour of Code - Kindergarten activity - FREE lesson plans!

One of the largest road blocks to having K-5 teachers implement computer programming skills is TIME! I have often heard my teachers saying "I just can't add more more thing to the day."

That's why I think that the success of incorporating computer science skills INTO the curriculum is essential! Currently, I am looking at the CCSS and the learning progressions. Using Scratch (www.scratch.mit.edu) - a FREE website, I am working on creating lessons that are aligned to the CCSS in ELA and math.

Please feel free to use the FREE resources and worksheets for the Hour Of code week - December 9th thru December 15th!  The worksheets take the Kindergarten student through the process of creating a holiday card through various screen shots.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/14804494/#player

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Creating a BASIC digital story-telling project with only 3 programming blocks!

Worked on the first lesson today and finally have it ready for you to use. I will continue adding lessons/worksheets/ rubrics/ instructional videos through the remainder of the year. Please keep checking the Blog, for updates.

Here is the video:



and the worksheets (including a teacher resource page, student worksheet AND rubric) can be found on the following website page:

https://sites.google.com/a/stretchinstructor.com/k-8-programming-playground/lessons/digital-storytelling/grades-K-2



If you decide to try this, please feel free to let us know how it goes by providing a comment to this post.



What Most Schools Don't Teach...

So...how do we take the intimidation of coding (computer programming) out of the equation? "In the next ten years, there will be about 1.4 million jobs in computer science and only 400,000 qualified graduates to fill those jobs."

Please see the following video that stresses the importance of computational thinking and learning how to code (program). If you attended my classroom 2.0 live webinar yesterday, this video is a more detailed version of the one we previewed at the beginning before the session started. It REALLY is a powerful message and includes Bill Gates and a quote from Steve Jobs.



Stay tuned for my first instructional video geared toward my vision of K-8 computational thinking (programming) for all! I will be posting a video for the "newbies" that uses only three of the programming blocks and is easy enough for even the K-2'ers!

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Monday, January 28, 2013

Video Game creation for learning!

Throughout the school year, students create PowerPoints, Prezis, Digital Stories, Posters, etc...why not create a video game?

My daughter has a teacher who does an excellent job differentiating for the needs of her students. Thus when Bailey showed an interest in electricity and compacting through the unit, she allowed her to create a video game to help her classmates review for the test. 

Scratch Project

Needless to say, she earned a 100% on the final unit test and she  new the content forward and backward. In the process of creating the game, she really had to "know her stuff!"

Her classmates had a lot of fun reviewing with the game and test scores were higher than normal for the entire class! Many students now want to learn how to create these games.