A Sunflower Experience

Yesterday, I started my new Scratch classes. The first class had six boys between the ages of 10 and 11. Five of them were from my first Scratch class and one was new.

I thought that I would try to integrate poetry with Scratch and see if it worked.  We did shared reading of a poem entitled "The Sunflower" written by a friend of mine called Thomas Chua. This poem was taken from his book "Beyond the Fall".  I had bought one stalk of sunflower and a packet of sunflower seeds.  We enjoyed the sunflower seeds and admired the sunflower. Our discussion went well but the planned activity did not so I had to junk the rest of my prepared lesson and we continued with scratching two projects which were unrelated to the poem. Perhaps I should have persevered but never mind, I must think through and try something else next week.

In the second class, I had only one student, an eight-year-old boy. He had found my first Scratch class tough.  However, we had such a good time yesterday.  I wanted to integrate Scratch with art and reading. I showed him the sunflower and asked him to draw it. You can see his beautiful picture in the link below.  Then we tried to record him reading "The Sunflower" but my equipment had some problems so we had to give up after a few tries. Sigh.

After that, I asked him to try writing something about the sunflower and he did. I thought it a very sweet poem. You can read it at the link below.

I am very encouraged by the integration of Scratch with poetry and art especially for the second class and am challenged to think about improving the first class.  If you have any ideas, please let me know.