Scratch JR - amazing app!

Scratch Jr is a fantastic app that introduces students to programming language that enables them to create their own interactive stories or games as well as many other amazing things!

Students can join programming blocks to make characters move, jump, dance and even speak! They can design and modify characters and backgrounds making their creations as creative as they like!

This term I used Scratch Jr app for iPads, with my 1/2 class when teaching mapping, location and grid co-ordinates. 

My students completed a different scratch activity with different maps over the week.  They took photos of the images and set them as their backgrounds in the app. They then followed set instructions to move their characters to certain locations, in certain directions etc. 
Below is a description of how we used each map. 

---

 

This was our first map after discussing positional language. The students had to follow the directions to get their character the the end of the map. 

This was tricky for some students and they needed to really count how many programming blocks they needed and which block they needed to make their character move the right way. 

Below is some videos of their amazing efforts!

---

This was a great map that the kids loved using! They had to use 3 different characters and find 3 different ways to get the the grade 1 room from the library. 
I also wrote a story of my day as a students and the students had to follow the directions and take their character different destinations over the 'school day'. This lesson was differentiated as the lower students had a different number of locations compared to the higher students. 

we had a lot of fun with this map!

This was a fun map to use. The students had to follow directions to get to the treasure chest. 
They then had to find the quickest way to the treasure chest without going over any picture. The longest way to the treasure and a way that involved going past, under and over certain images on the map. 

They loved pretending they were pirates! 

A spooky map for this lesson!

The idea of this map was very similar to the pirate map. Students had to follow set instructions on the board as well as find the quickest and slowest ways. 

They loved making spooky noises and having their characters have scared faces.

Scratch is a great app to use for a variety of curriculum areas. In literacy students can make their narrative stories come to life, tell stories using their characters and They can retell stories using characters from books. You can also use it in a variety of ways in numeracy including the way we did.

My students also love just programming their own things in scratch and often in free time are as we call it 'scratching' away. 

So download it and give it a go its awesome (don't forget to share it with us!)

-sarah