Mensa for Kids Pinterest Boards
I have previously posted about Mensa for Kids’ game site and lesson plans resources. Recently, I discovered their Pinterest Boards, which offer a ton of resources for teachers, parents, and students that range from apps to ideas for teaching technology. There are book recommendations from kids, inspirational videos, and even classroom design ideas. Here is a link to a fun “Brain Breaks” idea from Liz at “The Happy Teacher”, which I found on Mensa’s Teaching Resources board. Or, if you are a parent, you might want to check out these Rainbow Sock Bubble Snakes from Tammy at “Housing the Forest” that was pinned to the Kids and Activities board. Whether you are looking for teaching or parenting inspiration, the Mensa Education and Research Foundation has a great Pinterest selection for you!
Next Year Will Be Even Better – Programming for Kids
from www.tynker.com
For many of us, at least in the United States, another school year is over. Even as we eagerly embark on our rejuvenation journeys for the summer, you might be thinking, as I am, of new ideas for the next school year. This week, I would like to share some of the improvements I hope to make in my classroom for the 2013-2014 school year. Today’s post is about the benefits of teaching programming to our students.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have probably noticed that I am a huge advocate for teaching programming to kids. You can see this trend building in a lot of the education blogs and professional publications. Like all trends, it needs to be done right so that it will not be a colossal failure or a “flash in the pan.” Here is why it should be done, and how I plan on doing it next year in my classroom.
Why We Should Teach Programming to Kids
I think that there is a misconception that this is all about teaching kids a new “language” that is useful in the career market. While that is, perhaps, one of the benefits, I think that it should not be the main purpose. Programming languages evolve quickly, and teaching a specific one might be likened to teaching Latin. It can help you to decode other languages, but it is unlikely you will use it daily.
I learned Basic when I was in high school. I haven’t used it since. But I still remember some very important lessons that I learned in that class that can be extrapolated for real life.
The most important lesson was that, if you are not getting the results you want, you can’t keep doing the same thing. I remember the first couple of times a program did not work the way I wanted it to, and I kept saying to the computer, “That’s not what you’re supposed to be doing.”
Once I realized that I only had myself to blame, I would set about finding out what I had done wrong. This led to the next life lesson – find the real source of the problem or your “fix” will make things worse. Sometimes I had to dig deep into the code to figure it out, but would not realize that until I had tried one or two simple revisions that would end in disaster.
When programming, you also advance through the Scientific Process, and learn to change one variable at a time if your conclusion is not what you expected.
And finally, programming is not all about logic. Once you understand the code, you can use your imagination to create unusual, unique, and even beautiful programs.
What I Plan to Do Next Year
As some of my colleagues pointed out this year, Programming falls very easily into something that we already have in our curriculum for elementary gifted students – Systems Thinking. Now that I am becoming familiar with Tynker through the online summer class I’m offering, I plan to use Tynker with my 3rd graders during our Systems Thinking unit. If you want to start anywhere with programming (from about 7 or 8 years old and up), I would highly recommend Tynker as you can create classes and monitor student progress very easily. Plus, it has an engaging curriculum of projects.
I want to weave programming throughout my K-5 gifted classes, so I will begin my Kinders with the iPad app Daisy the Dinosaur. For 1st, we will move on to Kodable, and for second, Hopscotch. (I may switch these last 2 around – I need to play with them more to determine difficulty levels.)
3rd grade, as I mentioned, will do Tynker. 4th grade will work on Cargo-Bot. And, 5th grade will work with Gamestar Mechanic (which is web-based).
If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment. Also, for even more links for Programming for Kids, feel free to visit my Pinterest board on this topic.
Summer Enrichment Flyer
This week, I am focusing on providing resources to “Squash the Summer Slide” as ReadWriteThink puts it. Parents often ask me at this time of year for ideas to keep my students challenged over the summer, and here is a treasure trove of resources.
Kacie Germadnik, a colleague of mine, created this awesome flyer with Smore that offers excellent ideas for keeping children engaged in learning throughout the summer break. It suggests activities, websites, and apps that will encourage higher level thinking. I’m really bummed because I can never get these things to embed correctly on this blog, so you will have to visit this link to see it – but it will definitely be worth your while! She plans to update it as she finds more resources, so don’t forget to keep checking back!
Yesterday’s “Summer Slide Squasher” can be found by clicking here.
FlipPix Art
FlipPix Art – Kids
Well, I finally did it. I finally found an app that is free, happens to be available on both Android and iOS, is engaging, and is educational.
FlipPixArt is based on an old Japanese logic puzzle that offers a matrix and clues about which boxes should be colored in each row and column. By using the numbers at the top of each column and the beginning of each row, one must deduce the correct boxes to “paint” and which ones to “hammer” out of the picture.
Once the puzzle is solved, an object or animal is added to the scene at the beginning of the game. In the free “Zoo” version, there is one scene with 36 puzzles needed to complete it. Recently, the “Holiday” version went free (though I don’t know for how long), and it has 6 holiday scenes with 74 puzzles. However, one of the scenes in the “Holiday” version is a bar scene, so I would not recommend it for educational purposes. There are many other versions – including the Kids one – some are for free, and some cost. So far, my favorite free one is the Model Plane version. There is also a Jurassic one that is sure to appeal to some of those dinosaur enthusiasts.
This is a good app for the classroom because it allows for different players on the same device, so they can each play at their own level. It also offers a great tutorial. I would say that this is a good app for 3rd grade and up, though younger children can probably enjoy it with a bit of guidance.
Click here to access FlipPix Art – Zoo for Android.
The 5×5 puzzles are good to start with. The 10×10 puzzles will give more interesting picture results. Some of the apps also have 15×15.
The Benefits of Teaching Programming
I know this is a topic that is getting a bit repetitious on my blog, but I really can’t emphasize enough how important I think it is that we offer programming to our students at an early age. This article from MindShift, explains how learning programming has far-reaching effects, and should not be reserved for only those who aspire to careers in technology. ”Why Programming Teaches So Much More Than Technical Skills”, by Ian Quillen, explains 4 specific benefits of receiving an education in this area: Subject Mastery, Systems Thinking, Collaboration, and Passion.
Robotics clubs are a good start in the elementary schools, but we need to think about adding more. Here is my Pinterest board of resources for “Programming for Kids” with links to app, websites, and other articles of interest in this area.
Wordle Jigsaw Puzzles
When I saw this idea on “Learning to the Core“, I thought it would make a great activity for the end of the school year. Basically, your students create a Wordle, and then it is made into an online jigsaw puzzle for them to solve. Depending on the ability of your students, the Wordles could: describe their school year, summarize a particular unit, give clues about a student in the class, use Word Wall words, be a famous quote, etc…
Once the Wordles are created, a screenshot can be taken and saved or e-mailed to the teacher, who can load them into a class account on Jigsaw Planet for all students to solve.
My wheels are already turning on how I might use this during the summer to keep my gifted students thinking.
Some other sites or apps you could use to create the images for the jigsaws might be: Tagxedo, WordFoto(iOS), You Are Your Words, Tagul, ABCya Word Clouds.
appoLearning
(Full disclosure, I have written some of the reviews of apps on the site – Spatial Reasoning for elementary and Logic and Creative Problem Solving for middle school.)
appoLearning is a relatively new guy on the block when it comes to educational app reviews. The site comes from the developers of appolicious. They recognized the complexities of finding apps on the iTunes stores, and produced a site that gives you many more tools to narrow down your search.
appoLearning is just as ambitious, though the format is a bit different. “Experts” review educational apps using a special report card, and describe their top 5 in each category. Some of the apps are free, and others are not. If an app scores highly enough to be in the top 5, though, you can be sure that it is well worth its price. One of the highest price apps that I reviewed, Dragon Box, for example, is one of the best educational apps I’ve ever run across.
If you are a parent or teacher who is completely overwhelmed when you search for “education” apps on the iTunes app store, then appoLearning is the perfect antidote.
You can learn more about appoLearning here.
Some More Activities for the End of the School Year
Here are a couple more technology integration ideas for the end of the school year:
QR Code Year-End Reflection – You can read more about this tic-tac-toe reflection activity in my post from last year around this time. It isn’t anything showy, but a nice way to round out the year, and the students always love the added mystery of scanning QR codes.
Thinglink Favorite Memories – I have been meaning to use Thinglink with my students all year, and finally got around to trying it – right when they are about to leave. I’m not sure this idea is original, but my brain seemed to think it was a great idea at one o’clock Monday morning. I took a class photo of my 2nd grade gifted students, and then asked them to each share a favorite memory from their years in GT so far. Then I uploaded the pic to Thinglink and uploaded the videos to my Google account. I tagged each of the kids in the pic with their video. I embedded it into our class blog, and now the parents have a nice, interactive photo that won’t take up any closet space. Here is a link to the post.
Below is a neat Thinglink example I found of suggested iPad apps.
More Aurasma Ideas – Great for the End of the Year!
Vist Smarticles to find out how to trigger the Aurasma overlay on this business card!
Mary Howard at “Your Smarticles” posted an awesome list of ways that you can use the Aurasma app in your classroom. For those of you new to Aurasma, I like to describe it as QR codes on steroids. However, any image can be the trigger – not just unattractive codes. I was impressed with Mary’s creative ideas, and I was even more impressed by the huge Aurasma Scavenger Hunt Mystery Person Silhouettes package that I downloaded from her Teachers Pay Teachers store. It is $5.00, but so well worth it! She has put a LOT of work into this download, and all you have to do is choose where to post the mysteries and make sure you subscribe to her Aurasma channel. Your students will love you for giving them this fun activity at the end of the year!
You can visit one of my posts, or this post on “Thrasymakos” to learn more about using the free Aurasma app.
Creating Silhouette Art with the iPad
I would be the first to raise my hand in a Superdome full of people if the following question was asked, “Who is the worst art teacher out there?” But if I can find a way to integrate art and technology, my lessons are sometimes fairly successful. This was one of those activities.
To complete this project we used the iPad camera, Tracing Paper Lite (free), and TypeDrawing ($2.99). There is a web site, Texter, that performs like TypeDrawing, and is free. However it does not have the font choices and the ability to import a picture as a background.
The students took pictures of each other in profile on the iPads. Then they opened Tracing Paper Lite, imported their pictures, and traced their silhouettes. If traced so that the silhouette has no openings, the students can then fill it with black paint. Because they were using Tracing Paper Lite, which did not have an easy way to export their silhouettes, I had them take screen shots (be sure to get rid of the grid in the background first), and crop them in the Photo Album. Then they opened TypeDrawing (here is a SnapGuide to using this app), imported the silhouettes, and added the traits that they felt characterized them.
I have seen this done without the use of technology, but the students enjoyed the freedom TypeDrawing gave to personalize the fonts, the colors, and even the direction of the words. Does anyone else have ideas for how this could be used?
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