First up, my apologies for missing two weeks of Sunday blogs. Life has been busy as usual and my role of Nanny ranks higher than daily business. My hubby and I had the pleasure of entertaining and caring for our lovely grandson, let me tell you that this was like a full week at work! My hat goes off to all the parents of a two year old, what a challenge it is to keep up with them 24/7. Having said it was hard work, it was also such a joy, we stomped through puddles, explored the local walk bridge over the river (both on and under), tramped through the Jarrah forest and across the paddocks. Every stick, stone, flower,  insect, animal, bird or bird noise held fascination. He questions everything and expects answers, and with gentle hands explores nature. He is a true scientist in the making.

Now to coding…

My Year 1/2 class has been loving the Ozobot Envelope City activity, over two lessons we have managed to complete the challenge. The change in their knowledge has been fantastic, most of the class now understands the purpose and use of the colour codes (we only used the basic ones). They managed to work in groups with only one group struggling with sharing/turn taking, and even this group completed the task. All students did incorporate the codes allocated to their envelop house into their roads and we all learnt about ‘direction matters’ with colour codes! We discussed why some worked and why some didn’t, we fixed errors or detoured around them. The difference in their application, construction and care between our first make a town activity and this one is vast.

For example:

This was our first ‘Make a Town’ activity attempt, just learning about what colours the sensors read and how the Ozobot reads the coloured lines. What makes a good road? Thin lines? Thick lines? Corners, loops, sharp turns, etc?

This is the Envelope City activity…using code with purpose!

After we completed the challenge I let them add more coded roads to their towns, this gave them more tries to get it right. We then went to town decorating our envelope buildings/houses and added all the essentials of a town environment, trees, flowers, fences, parks, etc. After all learning needs to be fun!

We then had a pop quiz, just to check if they had memorised any of the codes. A big ask, as remember we had only had two lessons. I just used my display colour code cards and just held them up with my fingers covering the titles. Then I asked for students to tell me what they were, the response was great. Many had learned them and responded with the correct answer, if they hadn’t I got them to check their mini cards in the envelope houses. All in all, I was very happy with the outcome…learning objective achieved 🙂