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
  • 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