Engagement of ELLs through Coding
Exhibited by:
PLO Attended:
- Engaging ELLs Through Coding
Coached by:
- Paula Waldron
PLO GOALS
- Support growing ELL population in new and creative ways.
- Develop cross curricular activities to promote new language understandings in all content areas, not solely ELA.
- Facilitate the implementation of Scratch in different content areas.
- Understand the difference between content and language objectives and how they are connected to promote student learning.
BENEFITS OF ENGAGING ELLS THROUGH HANDS-ON ACTIVITIES
- Provides an authentic learning experience for all students to access
- Establishes a comfortable collaborative learning experience
- Motivates students to learn language skills in order to explain their creations
SCRATCH IN THE CLASSROOM
- Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations.
- Students can learn the academic language of computer programming while creating projects that allow them to be creative.
- Teachers can adapt curriculum to incorporate any content area with Scratch
CONTENT vs. LANGUAGE OBJECTIVES
- Content Objectives: The academic goal of the lesson
- Ex. Create a sequence of loops with the different costume blocks for a sprite.
- Focused on the new academic vocabulary to create a language objective
- Ex. Create a sequence of loops with the different costume blocks for a sprite.
- Language Objectives: The academic vocabulary & structures needed to access the content
- Ex. Explain the difference between sprite, animation, and costume.
PLO LEARNINGS & TAKEAWAYS
- ELLs and all students benefit from teachers incorporating language objectives into their lessons in order to teach academic content.
- Hands-on coding with Scratch provide students a place to express academic language in a fun, creative, and low-stakes setting
Scratch Website: scratch.mit.edu
Access to Scratch Creative Computing Curriculum: scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide