Mrs. Palkovics, a teacher at Mehfoud elementary who works with first and second graders with Autism, has decided to use coding in her classroom this year. She was telling me that she saw a news report showing young children with Autism coding and how it was positively impacting their lives. Mrs. Palkovics then tried it at home with her own children and saw great promise.
The way she is doing this is FANTASTIC! She will introduce one concept through www.code.org and then repeat it every day that week so the children become very familiar with the concept before moving on. When I was in her classroom last week she had the children act out commands that will then be translated into their coding down the road. She then had each student come to the board to make a list of commands for her to follow. The commands were simple yet fun for example, dance, jump, and turn. This was all whole group and on the Promethean Board.
This week she had the students work on the Promethean Board to work on putting commands in order and then they used commands to control an Angry Bird so that it could catch a pig. Once they did the activity whole group they got on the classroom laptops and worked on it independently. The students were SO excited when they used the correct commands to catch that pig!
Mrs. Palkovics is going to continue to code with her fantastic students, and I could not be more thrilled to work with her and her awesome students. I’ll be posting various milestones from here class here on my blog, but you should really check out www.code.org. All of the curriculum that you need is located there and can be used with any grade K-5.
