Scratch Jn is a great little app to engage students in many areas of the curriculum – the extent of its use is never-ending. As a school which is interested in working with students and teachers on ways of accessing the Digital Technologies Curriculum in a cross-curricular manner, it is quite simply a gem of a tool to enable us to do this in the Junior Years. Once the basics of its use are grasped, it can be used by teachers to cater for different students, to extend students, to reach disengaged students, to encourage creativity, to reason systematically and to build some great computational thinking skills. This is of course, on top of the standard curriculum goal the teacher might be trying to consolidate, teach, extend or explore.
Will it seem like the technology is the focus during the initial learning episode or two? Of course it will – just as the technical use of a protractor, or a calculator or a new set of art pens will take the focus when first starting to use them. But the rewards are diverse once you have moved beyond this initial explicit teaching. Children will learn quickly and will rapidly move beyond your expectations. Teachers should be aware of not limiting the children to what we THINK they can do or achieve – give them scope and you will soon be learning with them. Once learnt, it becomes a tool that can be used across the curriculum.
Many of the basic skills are explained in these activities:
https://www.scratchjr.org/teach.html
There are also some ideas below:
