For the 2024-2025 school year, we are going to continue 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 September.
Clubs offered by Ms. Thoennes in the Media Center may include Code Club, Minecraft Club, and Elementary Battle of the Books (fourth or fifth graders).
In this club, students use a variety of online resources to explore computer science concepts and to create projects using computer programming.
We will use 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.)
We may also 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 may create games, animations, and more.
Other sites that students can use to explore computer science:
CS First (from Google): https://csfirst.withgoogle.com/s/en/home
Twine (interactive fiction): https://twinery.org/
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 setting of a book
A modern city
If we continue as we did in 23-24, we will have a fourth grade team offered during club time in the fall and a fifth grade team starting in January. Each team will have the opportunity to compete against teams from other schools at the end of the semester.
Students in EBOB will read books from a state list. We will divide up the books so that fourth grade reads half of the list and fifth grade reads from the other half. This division has not been decided yet. During the club, students will read and discuss the books.
At the competition, students will take turns answering questions about the books with help from their team. The questions are usually in the form of "In which book did a character...", and the students have to name the title and author of the correct book. For example, a question could be, "In which book did a character accidentally step into a magical world through the back of a wardrobe?" and the answer would be The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.
Updated 5/24/24 K. Thoennes