When Hannah McMacken first approached me about collaborating to do the hour of code with her 5th grade class I was excited! The first thing that came to mind was, awesome, let's make it a whole 5th grade thing. Since I am very lucky to get to work with a 5th grade team this year that are all very comfortable with technology and all seem to jump any chance to integrate it into their classes.
I started by emailing the building principals and the Administrative Team to see what step I needed to take to make this day happen. I gave them a rough plan of my vision for the day and waited for their response.
After a few days one of the principals popped by my lab and chatted with me a bit about my plans for the day. We talked about Vietnamese teacher coming and doing a session in Vietnamese and giving other specialists the option to reschedule class to a different day or doing a coding activity instead. He suggest I met with the grade level team when they returned from their week without wall to discuss their thoughts on these things. He was all in for it and gave the green light. I emailed the grade level teachers and waited for their response. Nearly a week later I had heard nothing so I followed up and let them know if I didn't hear back from any of them with a possible time to meet I would assume they were not interested and I would scrap the event. Needless to say they all replied within about 30 minutes of receiving my email and a planning meeting was set for a few days later.
We met and agreed on a date. One of the teachers asked about doing out at the new Nha Be Campus. I was hesitant on this because logistically it was quite complicated. So we put it out of our heads and began talking about a plan for the day, intro, on and off line activities, etc.
A few days later I was at the Nha Be campus and the teacher and principal there both thought it would be great to host it at their campus. So I sent an email to the ES campus principal and waited. Friday of that week after hearing nothing from him I went back to my plan of two separate events one at each campus. Only to have one of the ES campus Teachers come to me confused as the 5th grade team at the ES team had told their principal that they loved the idea of going to the Nha Be campus. So I switched gears yet again and put the wheels in motion. But my delay were not over with yet. The ES principal put a full stop to everything later that day and so we all waited. We waited until Tuesday afternoon of the next week. Needless to say I was getting very frustrated, so much so that I was very close, hours away in fact, from calling the whole things off.
Here I sit a week later with a schedule created, events/activities selected, groups created, name tags and signage created and sent off to be laminated. Participation certificates have been sent to all the grade 5 classroom teachers to be printed. Bus are booked and the classroom teachers are collecting permission slips! Friday is our big day.
My final preparation steps were to collect some media to share with the students at the intro and conclusion of our event on Friday. I also spent some time helping one of the teachers prep for her small group activity "Careers in Computer Science". As well as invite the Library and Technology Coordinators to join in the fun!
The names tags shown below were made by editing an item from TeachersPayTeachers. Each student will receive one in the color of their group, with their schedule for the day, name and class code on them. Teachers also will receive one in black with their name devices or unplugged icons on them. The idea is that everyone will wear this during the event.
Signage: schedules and room name/numbers were also created using the same editable iPod purchase from TeachersPayTeachers.
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