This is my first year to give students a chance to participate in the Hour of Code. I think it comes at a great time of the year, a time when it's hard to get students excited about most things school related because they all are focused on the fact that Winter Break is in sight! When I explained to my classes that I was going to be gone from school one day a few weeks back, they all wanted to know why. And of course, who my substitute was going to be, but that is an entirely new blog post. Anyway, when I told them I was going to a training for code.org, they immediately wanted to know what that was all about and what it meant for them. As I explained it the best I could and had them all sign up for their accounts so I would be able to fully participate in the training, I had no idea they would be as excited about it as they were. **
Generally, students get excited when their teacher is going to be gone for day, because let's face it, days where there is a substitute, significantly less work gets accomplished....depending on the sub. However, this was more than that, they were already asking me when they were going to be able to "Code" and could they log in and use their accounts without me. There aren't many things that kids want to do like this in school very often, so for me just mentioning this, I had a feeling this was going to be something that I was excited about doing as soon as possible! Now that Hour of Code is coming next week, I am even more excited to see what they think of it. All of my 5th and 6th graders will be participating in Hour of Code on Friday, December 12.
I love that code.org has tons of resources on their website to promote Hour of Code, like posters, videos, and banners, however, I feel like it's pretty unnecessary when it comes to getting my classes excited about coding. They are PUMPED and I haven't even mentioned that we are going to be doing this on Friday yet because they have big presentations to give for their Genius Hour projects on Wednesday and I don't want them to lose focus on that. I'll still show the intro videos and all of that, but just the idea that they are going to be able "Create" and be producers of content online is enough to hook them that I probably wouldn't even need to! I think Friday will be one of the best teaching days I have had all year, and that's saying something because I have had some pretty great days with these students so far!
After Winter Break, we will spend some time each week following the full code.org curriculum as well, and I also have some plans to introduce some of them who really take off with it to Scratch as well.
I have a feeling that I will have another blog post all ready to go next weekend after our code.org session next week with the Hour of Code!
**On a side note, the training that I attended was great. It was lots of fun, we learned a lot and we had some time to go through some of the code.org curriculum ourselves. I have to admit, it was hard for me to stop and focus on the trainer when he told us to stop working, which is something that I will have to keep in mind if I try to stop the kids from working to do something else.
