3^rd Grade Computers Week 1

Hello Greenwood friends! I hope everyone is staying safe, sound and heavily sanitized throughout this ongoing cabin fever inducing adventure! I will be emailing you lesson plans each week that that can be split into two weekly sections taking around 20-30 minutes to complete. If your student is showing a serious interest in the subject at hand, by all means let them continue past whatever lessons I have sent.

For week one we have the following lesson. This should be pretty easy for your child because we have briefly covered this subject earlier in the year. It’s important that students complete these lessons because they tend to build in complexity based on earlier Scratch tutorials and we’ll continue to explore this website in the upcoming years.

Parents, it’s a good idea to make a Scratch account for your student so that all of their work will be saved. Simply go to https://scratch.mit.edu/ and click on the “Join Scratch” button on the top-right of the page.

Please go to the following website and have your student follow the directions that accompany the lesson:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tutorial=all

From here students should do the following:

1. Click on the “Getting Started” tutorial

This will bring up a very short video tutorial covering the utmost basics of Scratch. What your student must understand from this is that the blocks and their operations that are located on the left side of the screen are color coded. Each section has its own set of operations. For example, the blue motion section has all of the motions for your character (called a ‘Sprite’). The Looks section has a different set of operations.

2. After watching the short video, click on the “Tutorials” button with the lightbulb at the top-left of the webpage. This will bring up several practice video tutorials. Then click on the one that says “Code a Cartoon”. Follow the instructions on the video that pops up. It can be paused and restarted to make sure students don’t get left behind.

3. Select each Sprite by clicking on their picture on the bottom-right of the page. Don’t forget to click the green arrow on the right of the video after it’s completed to complete ALL of the activities. They are very short so it shouldn’t be a problem.

Let me know if there are any issues! I know that this program has a bit of learning curve when first used but after a bit of practice it becomes quite easy to navigate.

- J

Jason Barlowe

jasonbarlowe@missouristate.edu