Creative ideas - Woodland Hills SD

As we finish the first scope and sequence for the semester, what are some of the creative activities that you have done so far, show us pictures and details of those creative lessons.

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If you haven’t done it already- the Dragon in the Village Activity Series is one of my favorites! 123 Activity Series - Dragon in the Village - Google Docs

You can do the Activities using either Touch or the Coder, and the final Activity in the trio has students build a “dragon pushing machine” using the Art Ring to get the dragon out of the village. It’s always a really fun time, and can make for some great extensions around building a dragon pusher - particularly using recycled materials like popsicle sticks, old CD’s, pipecleaners, foam board, etc.

I’ll tag @Laura_Mackay, @Anna_Blake, @Aldwin_Lauron, and @LORI_COLANGELO as the first group from the August Live Course @Aimee_DeFoe and I had on using 123 and GO in your regular education classrooms to share some things they’ve been doing! And I’m sure @James_Nesbitt may have some more fun stuff to share too! :slight_smile:

With Thanksgiving coming up, I’m thinking it would be super quick to adapt the Flamingos in the Wild activity to “Turkeys in the Woods!” Make your 123 into a turkey using the Art Ring, and code it to do a little turkey dance! :grinning:. Or, do a little thankfulness parade by having students write or draw what they are thankful for on a card, and attach it to the Art Ring. Then code the 123 Robots to parade around the Field together!

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We are trying to come up with something creative to use with the book, Balloons Over Broadway. Some of our groups did create turkeys instead of flamingos.

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Our first grade used the book The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything during the week of Halloween to practice sequencing a story. @Heidi_Danner had a few ideas for Thanksgiving. I tagged her and hopefully she will post the book. Love the idea of using the art ring and turning VEX into a turkey!!

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Thanksgiving brings to mind Thanksgiving Day Parades for me - I think it could be really cool to have the class create a parade float using the Art Ring, and code all of the 123 Robots to be in a parade together. You could have a class theme, or work with another classroom (or more!) to have a joint Thanksgiving Parade together. Could be a fun way to celebrate and show off what kids are doing with 123 :slight_smile:

Students could write stories for their floats, to describe what they made/why or a purely fictional story about what’s going on with their float. There’s plenty of good real world floats out there they could be inspired by! Basically, I’m picturing a twist on the GO Parade Float STEM Lab Unit for 123.

Fun idea! We try to incorporate a lot of movement and brain breaks into our lessons as well. It is a great way to help get the wiggles out before instruction. Here are a couple of silly Thanksgiving-themed movement videos you can integrate from the people at GoNoodle:
Maraca Turkey
Gobble Gobble Burp
Educators can sign up for a free account to track class progress and access the videos.

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As we approach the end, we are creating “floats” based off of Fall and Winter to use as a parade for next week.

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I love these ideas. Today students wanted to do the Dragons and Castle activity again. This time, students had to color the houses based on each of their library books they got this week. Just a way to spice things up.

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@Terry_Smith that’s so exciting! Feel free to share some parade pictures if you can!

@Desiree_White-Price that’s awesome! Revisiting activities and lessons with students is such a great learning tool. Not only does it reinforce the idea that there are many ways to solve a challenge, by simply moving the castle and houses on the Field, the whole project evolves! Students can reflect on how they approach things differently now, as compared to when they first did it, and can have a chance to articulate their learning in a low stakes, engaging way.

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I worked with our Astronomy teacher to have 8 robots circle the sun and various speeds in the gym. Each robot had a printed picture of one of our planets. It was pretty cool.

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