Diary of a Lead Teacher: summer wrap-up

Well the end of term is finally here and I think we can all agree it has been a tough one! But as I have mentioned previously, out of a negative situation always comes a positive. Teachers, children and parents have upskilled themselves with online platforms such as Google Classroom and we - as Digital Schoolhouse Leads - have managed to continue to deliver quality, online workshops, despite the many challenges. I am so excited for what next term will bring and I can definitely see a blended approach being used to continue to spread Digital Schoolhouse computing joy!

In my June blog, I had been working with Year 4 using Spheros to code Crazy Mazes. My final session involved the children continuing from where they left off.  It was amazing to see the children independently programming and using their debugging skills to code their mazes. Throughout lessons, I had been using the PRIMM approach to support the children’s coding skills and knowledge, so it was fantastic to see this coming to fruition. At the end of the session, they had still not arrived at the centre of the maze to kill the Minotaur but they had great fun trying! They learned so much alongside the computing curriculum such as communication skills, resilience and mathematical problem solving. This truly demonstrated why it is so important to have a cross-curricular approach – one which Digital Schoolhouse promotes - along with FUN of course!

My plan over the Summer holidays is to develop some DSH Digi-bytes to explore the fantastic workshops available on our website. I will try and feature a workshop each month as I am continuing my blog in September! If you have any favourites, then please let me know as I would love to hear from you!

Have a restful Summer everyone and keeeeeeeep Coding!