Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief

After a visit from author Wendelin Van Draanen, my library did a series of after school programs each based roughly around one of her books.  This program came from the first book in her Sammy Keyes series.  In the book, Sammy gets in trouble with a thief while watching him through her grandmother's binoculars.  So we decided to do something with binoculars.

We started off with a relay race.  We laid out 3 zigzag race lines on the floor with masking tape before the program started.  The children (from 3rd through 6th grades) then formed up into 3 teams.  The teams had to race up and down the lines while looking through the binoculars backwards.  Believe it or not, it is actually rather hard to follow a thin line on the floor with the binoculars backwards.  The children had fun with this.  Our winning team (made up of all 3rd graders) had so much fun they did it twice.

Next, we had the children partner up and gave these smaller teams a scavenger hunt sheet to complete.  My library is lucky to have a park right outside the meeting room doors.  Each of our five scavenger hunt items could be seen with binoculars while standing outside the meeting room.  There were two look for something and then make a rubbing (with a crayon).  There were two fill in the blank items based off signs in the park.  Then there was a piece of art to search out and then count the number of windows on this artwork.  This scavenger hunt tended to be a bit difficult.  But the various partners had difficulties with different items on the sheet, so there was not one item that was extremely hard.

The hardest part of preparing for this program was actually finding enough binoculars to use.  Me and my coworker borrowed and brought binoculars from home.  It is amazing how few people we asked had working binoculars.

Shredderman: Secret Identity

After a visit from author Wendelin Van Draanen, my library did a series of after school programs each based roughly around one of her books.  This program came from the first book in her Shredderman series.  In the book, the main character creates a webpage with his superhero-type alter ego flying across the screen.  So we decided to introduce children to some basic animation using Scratch, a graphical computer programming language.

Scratch is a free computer language created by MIT.  Go to http://scratch.mit.edu.  It is done on your internet browser so no downloading is needed.  You must create an account in order to save your work, but you can get started without an account.

After going over the four areas of the Scratch interface, I handed out a step by step lesson for the children to follow at their own speed.  I used a lesson I found (and slightly altered) at Edutopia.

Of the 42 students (from grades 3 through 6), about half of them followed the lesson.  For the most part, this half had no clue how to do any programming.  The other half pretty much did their own thing.  This second half broke into two camps.  We had some who used Scratch before. We also had some who were just investigating the various commands and backgrounds and sprites available to them.

I had a lot of fun with this program.  I must admit, before it started I was terribly nervous.  I had just learned some basics about Scratch before agreeing to do this program.  I still only know the basics and that was evident while working with some of the children.  Now I need to figure out what I will do for the next Scratch class in the Spring.