The Grade 2 students have finished their sea projects on Scratch. You can see all of them on our school blog by searching the Categories for “Scratch”.

THE SCRATCH PROJECT –

Step 1

Each student chose their own topic about what they might “See Under the Sea”. They searched the internet for information and chose sites that looked kid friendly. They copied the information onto a word document and the picture into their documents folder.

Step 2

They drew or made the Scratch sprite using the picture that they had saved to help them. They made a second costume for their sprite just be rotating the image slightly or by flipping it. This allowed them to program the sprite to swim while it moved across the screen.

Step 3

The students rewrote the information so that it was in their own words. Sometimes it was enough to delete the large words or difficult parts and it still made sense.

Step 4

They recorded the information straight onto Scratch using the voice recorder.

Step 5

They programmed the Scratch sprites that they had drawn to say the recordings. If they had more than one sprite they set wait times so that each sprite took turns to speak.
Finally we loaded the finished projects up to the Berwick Lodge Scratch site and used the embed code provided to put them onto our school blog.

This project has many outcomes that were valuable for the students.

• They have created an original animation using simple computer programming which involves higher order thinking and problem solving..
• They shared their knowledge, often helping the whole class once they had mastered some new programming
• They have started to develop skills for researching on the internet and rewriting material into words that make sense and that they understand.
• Using the recording feature of Scratch is important because it gives students instant feedback about the information they are sharing. We were able to laugh at some of the first attempts where the students used words straight from their research which made them sound like Wikipedia rather than grade 2 students.
• Their presentations were interesting and important so they were watched by other students which increased the knowledge of everyone in the class

This was the first time I had attempted a Scratch project with younger students – but it won’t be the last!

Click on the project below and press the Space Bar to begin
Learn more about this project