News From My Classroom
Six Word Memoir
One of the advantages of working in a small, rural school is that I get to really know my students well. There are students that I have had for four or more classes. As close as I get to my students, my view of them depends on the side that I see. The nature of school may prevent me from really understanding who they are. To help students express themselves I had them each create a six-word memoir. They had to tell a story about themselves in just six words. Some students took it seriously while others blew it off. It did allow me to understand many of my students better though!
Introduction to Coding
There was nothing certain about this year. I knew that at any point I could learn that we would be going remote for our instruction so it was very difficult to plan ahead. In order to provide effective instruction no matter the environment, I looked for lesson ideas that could work whether we were at home or at school. Since all of my students had Chromebooks I decided that I would work with them on coding; a skill that I find valuable to learn. Coding provides students (or anyone else) an opportunity to problem solve, reflect, revise, and engage in critical thinking. These are skills I try to incorporate into my curriculum as they help my students to be career/college ready. The coding was done with my 2nd graders, 3rd graders, and high school students.
Most of our work was done on code.org. We started with a brief introduction to block coding. My elementary students learned coding through a series of games while my high school students focused more on learning the basics of block coding through apps. Students were able to work at their own pace and those students who moved through the lessons quicker could work through optional challenges. For our final project, my high schoolers had to design, debug, and create their own app.
Example of block coding 
Splash screen for an app a student created
To expand upon this my high schoolers worked with coding a Sphero robot. They were given a series of tasks with increasing complexity. At first they just experimented. Then they had to create a program to make the robot make a square as it moves around the room. After that students had to create a program so that the LED’s would change color to match the color beneath the robot. We ended this project by talking about how tractors are becoming autonomous and self-driving. The students had to create a program that would have their robot do different things when it drove over different color patches of paper. This represented different fields that require different jobs for the tractor.
Experimenting with code 
Making it move in a square
Online Learning
It was very disappointing to miss out on three months of working with my students in person. Those are days that I will never get back. Their health and well-being was the top priority though. I knew that I would need to totally reinvent the way I teach to be effective through the remote model. The changes seemed to be successful as I had about 80% participation and many students really got into some of the projects that we did. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much time students put into their work outside of class! I’m proud of all of them!
Here are just a few examples of the great work that my students put together during that time.
There are more exciting things to be found on the next page!
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