I like to use February to promote kindness so I had my first-grade classes create Be Kind projects in Scratch Jr as a final project. I used this project to teach the send and receive messages blocks.
The first graders started in Seesaw with a video about being kind online and a music video from Sesame Street about Kindness and then a group discussion and a Kind Kids drawing prompt from Tracy Piltz on Seesaw (I may have played the music video a few more times as well). The next time we met we reflected on our kindness drawing and started creating an animated version in PBS Scratch Jr.
I reminded them that they could draw their own background. After creating or adding the background they needed two Sprite characters – I generally encouraged using people showing kindness to each other but being kind to animals is also good.
A lot of them wanted to animate asking questions like “Do you want to be friends?” or “Do you want to play?” and then having a response so I showed them the “send a message” code block and the reciprocal “receive a message” block for the response. They did a pretty good job of coding those up.
I made sure to have enough time to share their projects after adding a title and naming their project. I encourage good naming habits. ScratchJr defaults to a Project # which I try to compare to having a library full of books titled Book #.
I’m thinking of making them into an animated movie to share with the school community but it is time-consuming to record all of the projects on the iPad and compile them.
I was having so much fun with this kindness project that I had Kindergarteners make Valentine’s Day animations – or Be Mine projects. In my K classes, I introduced (again?) Scratch Jr.’s drawing and editing tools to draw hearts. They struggled a bit with the order of choosing the drawing tool, drawing then switching to the fill bucket then back to the drawing tool but it was a good exercise.
After making the hearts we added a character to receive them. Then we used the blue code blocks to animated our valentines. I introduced the pink “grow” block to add growing to the movement of their Valentine hearts. It was so fun to say over and over “make your heart grow” to the little 5-year-olds. It was a bucket-filler for me and the kids had a great time – after some initial frustration learning new stuff. Some of them even experiemented with other pink blocks like “shrink” and “hide”. We didn’t have time to share the projects but their teachers came around and saw them.
My Code Club Journal 