Full STEAM Ahead: 1st Grade Code A Program for Dot to Make Sounds

Code a Program for Dot to Make Sounds

Lesson Plan for 1st Grade

Prepared by Mrs. Yandell

OVERVIEW & PURPOSE

Students will continue to explore using the five senses to explore our environment.  This activity will give our first graders the opportunity to learn the basics to coding while exploring the sense of sound.  

EDUCATION STANDARDS

1. Next Generation Science Standards
2. Common Core
3. Integrated Math, English, Language Arts, & Science

Collaboration

4. The students will understand how God created us with the abilities to experience His creation.
5. The students will use their five senses to investigate, describe, and compare objects.
6. The students will use their five senses to enhance their writing abilities.
7. The students will use their five senses to describe an object.
8. The students will recognize how they interact with their environment through their senses

OBJECTIVES

1. Discovering the importance of our five senses
2. Discovering God’s desire for our senses
3. Learning to make observations using sense of sound
4. Learning the importance of observations to identify characteristics
5. Comprehension
6. Problem Solving
7. Creativity
8. Planning out a series of instructions
9. Write a program
10. Test- see if your program works
11. Debugging- find where you made a mistake in your program instruction and make, make changes as necessary!

MATERIALS NEEDED

1. Ipads
2. Dot smart robots

VERIFICATION

Steps to check for student understanding

1. How does your sense of sound help you to identify things in our environment?
2. Can your sense of sound help you learn more about your environment?
3. Did your group work well together?
4. Were you able to correctly code a program for your robot?

ACTIVITY

Students will work in groups of four and use the Blockly app to code programs to make Dot make sounds.  

We will spend the first part of class to go over how the Blockly app works, and review proper robot handling.  

Each group will take turns coding specific programs for their robots.  

Our first graders have been learning about using their five sense to explore their environment… so I thought it would be appropriate to teach coding as we explore sound. The lesson was titled... Code a Program for Dot to Make Sounds.

This was a great opportunity for me to introduce the Blockly app to our first graders!  I chose to use Dot in this activity so that the students would be more engaged in programming rather than all of their attention be focused on driving (Dot can only make sounds and change light patterns.) The first part of the activity, I spent time going over the Blockly app and showed the students which block categories we would use for today's activity (students must be able to read in order to use this app.)

For this lesson, I allowed students to use blocks from the sound and light categories.  Using the sound blocks, students could chose animal sounds, transportation sounds, weird sounds, and even record their own voice.  I gave them freedom to explore the app and create their own programs.  Students worked in groups of two or three and were instructed to take turns adding blocks.  Every student was very engaged and excited about this opportunity to use the robots.  

I would highly recommend this lesson for introducing the Blockly app to younger students.  

How awesome is it that first graders have the opportunity to create programs for robots!  

Five Senses: Observation by Touch with First Grade

Observation by Touch

Lesson Plan for 1st Grade

Prepared by Mrs. Yandell

OVERVIEW & PURPOSE

Students will learn the importance of using their senses to make observations.  Students will use only touch to identify characteristics of objects and will practice grouping things by their observations.

EDUCATION STANDARDS

Collaboration

1. The students will understand how God created us with the abilities to experience His creation.
2. The students will use their five senses to investigate, describe, and compare objects.
3. The students will use their five senses to enhance their writing abilities.
4. The students will use their five senses to describe an object.
5. The students will recognize how they interact with their environment through their senses

Graphing

1. Students will make comparisons
2. Students will be counting, adding and subtracting
3. Students will be organizing data in a systematic way in order to discover patterns

Sorting and Classifying

1. Students will observe similarities and differences
2. Students will make comparisons of size, shape, color and detail
3. Students will relate abstract ideas to their concrete existence in the real world

OBJECTIVES

1. Discovering the importance of our five senses
2. Discovering God’s desire for our senses
3. Learning to make observations using sense of touch
4. Learning the importance of observations to identify characteristics
5. Recognizing categories of living things vs non living things

MATERIALS NEEDED

1. Blindfolds
2. 10 Objects
3. Ipad
4. Seesaw app

VERIFICATION

Using the Ipads, Seesaw app… Make a video of each group

1. What did you do?
2. What did you learn?
3. What questions did you have?
4. What makes the objects living or non -living?

ACTIVITY

Start the activity by talking about the five senses that God gave us and why they are important.  After discussing the five senses, we will then discuss the importance of touch and how it is used in our daily life to make observations of things.  Talk about how touch can be used to describe characteristics of objects, and how we use the sense of touch to explore our environment.  

The students will work at their tables, and be given a blindfold.  The will be told there are ten toy objects on their desk, and they are to explore each object by only using one of their senses, touch.  While still blindfolded, the students are to group the objects into two piles, living and nonliving based off of the characteristics they identify while touching the objects.  When they have placed all of the objects into two piles, they can take off the blindfolds and see how well they did classifying objects by using only touch.  

Students will work in pairs, using the Seesaw app to video themselves responding to the verification questions; which are: What did you do? What did you learn? What questions did you have? What classifies the objects as living or non -living?

Recap written by Mrs. Yandell:

Over this quarter, the first graders are learning about using their five senses to identify things in our environment, classifying and grouping objects, and studying what makes something living or nonliving. Over the next five weeks, our first graders will be doing STEAM activities that explore one sense each week. This activity was a great opportunity for our first graders to explore the importance of our five senses and using our sense of touch to classify objects into groups without using their other senses.

Two weeks ago, our students explored the importance of our sense of touch and how we can use touch to identify things in our environment. The first graders had a blast with this lesson because they were given the opportunity to be blindfolded, which is a big hit when to this age group. Students were asked to name things that are living and nonliving and we then we discussed characteristics about each group.  The class was split into groups, and the students participated in an activity where they were all blindfolded and given objects to touch and were told to only use their sense of touch to decide what the objects were.  Then they were to make two groups, and place the objects they thought were living in one pile and the nonliving in another.  The kids loved this activity, but I must say it was challenging for a lot of them to keep their blindfolds on, or not to peek!

The first class that did this activity, I had the students use ipads and film what their groups learned using the seesaw app.  I realized this was not the best choice for this age group, because most of the students were too excited and started to be silly on their videos.  So I changed the lesson for the other classes, and had each group take two pictures of their living and nonliving piles and share those on their seesaw app.  This approach worked out much better!