Clubs

For the 2023-2024 school year, we are going to offer clubs during the school day. These will be held on the sixth day of our Enhancement rotation. We will try to place students in the clubs of their choice. Club assignments will change each quarter. We will start in mid-September.

Clubs offered by Ms. Thoennes in the Media Center may include Code Club, Minecraft Club, Morning News Club (for fifth graders), and Elementary Battle of the Books (fourth or fifth graders).

Code Club

In this club, students use a variety of online resources to explore computer science concepts and to create projects using computer programming.

We primarily use the coding site Scratch (from MIT): http://scratch.mit.edu. We use tutorials that are built into Scratch and some that are available on the Raspberry Pi website. Students have created games, animations, and more.

We have also used Code.org which has short "Hour of Code" activities and longer courses.

Any student can use this resource -- they do not have to be part of the Code Club.

Other sites that students can use to explore computer science:

CS First (from Google): https://csfirst.withgoogle.com/s/en/home
Codecademy at http://www.codecademy.com
Twine (interactive fiction): https://twinery.org/

Minecraft Club

Using Minecraft on iPads, students in this club work together to gather resources, survive dangers, and create shelters on Survival mode. They also create intricate projects in Creative mode. One of our goals is to create projects that demonstrate how Minecraft could be used in classrooms to explore curricular topics.

For example, students have worked on models of:

The sun
An atom
A dinosaur skeleton
A library
The Biltmore House from Serafina and the Black Cloak
The setting of the book City of Orphans
A modern city

Updated 8/7/23 K. Thoennes