Friday, December 13, 2019

Coding Children's Literature

This week, schools around the world celebrated #HourOfCode!  We are a Code to the Future school so our students practice coding every week.  However, I wanted to show students how coding can be combined with literature and used in any setting.  Coding is a form of storytelling so my idea was to read a book and then have the students using coding to retell the story.


Image result for big mooncake for little star

We started by reading the book A Big Mooncake for Little Star.  This book is on the 2020 Monarch Award list (Illinois).  In this book, Little Star and her mama bake a mooncake and put it in the sky to cool.  Each night, Little Star flies up to the moon, takes a little nibble, and then flies back to bed.  On one double-page spread, we see the different phases of the moon as Little Star eats away at it.  In the end, Mama notices the mooncake is gone and the two make another one.  This is a perfect book to use for retelling using coding because there is lots of repetition!

Kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade
After reading the book, we talked about the important story elements in the book: a moon, a character, and a night sky.  Our students are very familiar with ScratchJr.  I showed them an example of what was expected and we talked about the "loop" block, which would be helpful with this project.  Then, students got to work!

Kindergarten:





They did an amazing job remembering the story and coding it! Some students even added extra elements such as Little Star's mama and a moon getting smaller and smaller.  Here is a video of a few of our 1st grade students explaining how they created their code.



2nd Grade
All week I've been waiting for a student to figure out how to make the moon get smaller each time Little Star goes up to take a bite.  Finally on Friday, Dante was the first to figure it out!  



Coding promotes important skills such as critical thinking, sequencing, and creativity...and it's so much fun!!  The students were so engaged during this activity and we can't wait to combine literature and coding more in the future!

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