My favorite part of holiday activities (at any time of the year!) is learning about different traditions students have. When designing activities, the key is to let students be creative and tell the class about themselves.
Small changes can make a huge difference when keeping middle school students focused and on task.
I’m headed into year three of individualized learning! What’s changed? What do we like? What am I still working on?
f you haven’t already seen the classroom Hummingbird Kit bundles, go take a minute to bask in all its organizational glory. I am determined to keep them beautiful. My overarching strategy is to give the students ownership so they, too, want to keep the kits organized. Though this post will specifically detail the classroom procedures I use with the Hummingbird Kit, the resources are easily adaptable to whatever you’re using!
It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to use hardware in my middle school classroom, so I was nervous and excited to break in our new HummingbirdBit Robotics Kits. In the before times, I had used a similar kit, and I knew I wanted to do a better job of isolating the coding and the hardware before combining the two. I also wanted to spend time focusing on input versus output devices as this always seems to be a challenge.
With the added pressure of Back to School Night in person (we hosted virtually last year in a modified format), I decided to stick with what I’m most comfortable with and just teach. In each class, I picked out a quick unplugged activity or discussion to give a truer sense of what a period in my classroom is like. Here are some ideas.
A few weeks ago I decided to work through this Mixtape tutorial on Repl.it that utilizes the Spotify API. While an excellent tutorial on it’s own, especially for someone teaching themselves, I saw an awesome opportunity to expand each part with rich discussions and discovery activities. Over the course of a few lessons, students explore HTTP requests, discuss the values set forth by the Developer’s Terms of Service, interpret JSON objects, write basic HTML, make use of Flask and Python, and put it all together in the original tutorial’s Mixtape project.
Many years ago my mom (a computer teacher long before I was!) bought me the Booleo card game. It’s a great way to practice with logic gates and the critical thinking skills necessary to plan ahead.
I also realized this week that I still had an active sellers account on Teachers Pay Teachers with some activities from when I was a math teacher. There’s nothing I wouldn’t share with my teacher friends for free so here are the few documents I had up.
