Engagement of ELLs through Coding

Exhibited by:

• Nicole Rank
• Amanda Solarsh

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
• 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