It's Been Awhile

Our blog has been quiet for awhile but we've been working hard in our classrooms, implementing our lessons that we have found and created.

We met as a team in December and continued adding lesson plans to our repertoire. See here Lesson Plans

In K7 Sarah's class, we read the book, "Hello Ruby, Adventures in Coding" By Linda Liukas. Check out here website here- Hello Ruby This is a great place to start to teach coding, even in Kindergarten! Hello Ruby has a lot of lesson plans to try out. So far in K7 we have tried
Sequence
Decomposition
Pattern Recognition
Map Algorithms

We can't say enough about this book. The important thing students have learned so far is that in coding, it is important to give specific instructions. Everything needs to be in little steps. We've made mistakes but we keep coming back and discussing them because we learn from our mistakes! 





Hello Ruby Coding

What Have We Done So Far?

What Have We Done So Far? 

May 2017

Jen, Sue and Sarah went to Toronto for 2 days of training. We were able to get a start on our project, set some goals, and participate in some great sessions. 

We participated in budget sessions, practical project management, working with our team, using Teach Ontario and learning sessions. We listened to some great talks from members from OTF, OECTA and the Ministry of Education. 

Check out the video we recorded after our training session! 

 TLLP Training Session 

September 2017

 We explored the Math continuum found here: Edugains

We then discussed how the Full Day Kindergarten Curriculum fits into the Grade 1 and Grade 2 Math Curriculum and created our own continuum found here: FDK/Grade 1/Grade 2 Curriculum


October 2017
We began creating lessons plans and ideas for our "resource bank." We want to provide educators with lesson ideas that promote computational thinking in the early years. 
Check out our first lesson plan here 

Computational Thinking

WHAT IS COMPUTATIONAL THINKING!? 

We had a great discussion on what computational thinking is. Through this discussion we found some excellent resources. We kept coming back to this graphic:

Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating a problem and expressing its solution(s) in such a way that a computer—human or machine—can effectively carry out.

It is broken down into the following steps:

1. Taking Apart/Breaking down the problem
2. Finding Similarities and Differences (recognizing patterns)
3. Pattern Generalization-applying logic to the pattern you recognize. Exists only as an idea.
4. Procedure- the steps/instructions that can be applied

Computational Thinking Course

Excellent Website for Educators exploring coding in all grades- Barefootcas