CSEdWeek Togetherness Tuesdays

At school, we have Togetherness Tuesdays to encourage more families to spend some unplugged quality time together.  They can play a game, read a book, watch a movie, cook a dish, or bake some cookies.  Another way to celebrate CSEdWeek is to do some sketching and coloring together, and learn about algorithms along the way.

The first one is to help Snowy and Frosty build a friend by following an algorithm.  My five year old son really enjoyed this activity and helped me come up with two more.  In the Slides, you will find Snowy and Frosty need your help to build a home, and create a car to go to the market. Feel free to print and use it with your students.

Editable Resource:
Snowy&Frosty's Winter Algorithm 

Happy Coding!

Celebrating CSEdWeek

CSEdWeek is December 9-15 this year! How are you celebrating? At our school, our principal is adding a fun fact about a pioneer in his morning announcement.  Of course, there are many more heroes in computer science, so this is one small way to raise awareness of the people who've made an impact in our daily lives.

Editable Resource:
CSEdWeek Pioneers

In the computer lab, we are creating binary code bracelets to teach students about the computer science word, binary, which means a way of representing information using two options.

Editable Resource:

Binary Bracelet activity

Happy Coding!

Heart Inspired Art

This semester is my first time as an art teacher and I want to document some of the projects we started.  For the month of February, we were inspired by hearts and kindness.  We decorated boxes for students to leave sweet notes for one another.

We studied the artist Wassily Kandinsky and used the color wheel (credits to MrPrintables) to discuss complementary and analogous colors. Students used oil pastels to outline the hearts then used water colors to paint each of the hearts.

We studied the artist Chris Uphues and looked at the murals he's created.  Then students went off to make Valentine's Day cards for their loved ones.  

We studied the artist Piet Mondrian and created Piet Mondrian inspired hearts (credits to KinderArt).  Students cut out hearts then created lines to make shapes.  Afterward they used oil pastels and black glue to color in the shapes.   

Pixel Art

Our students learned that pixels are tiny squares that makes up an image.  Afterward, we used Make8BitArt and some inspired pixel images to recreate our own.  They worked diligently and the images came out very artistic!

Tagxedo Creations by Fifth Graders

Our fifth grade students discussed and wrote about current and future goals.  Students followed some general instructions. They shared hobbies they were interested in and passionate about such as music, art, gym, etc. Afterward, they used an app called Tagxedo, which turned words from famous speeches, news articles, slogans, and themes into a visually stunning word cloud.