Book Review Writing

Our students read several “Graded readers” every term and later they do the book review of each one. Graded readers are "easy reading" books used to support the extensive reading approach to teaching English.

Reviewing a book helps a child’s reading comprehension. The purpose of book reports is to demonstrate that the books were read, to understand and write about what they have read. They are often done for an assignment. Book reports focus on the plot of the book. Our students after reading the graded book, they write the key vocabulary and look it up in a dictionary o translator app and then they write a sentence including this word or phrase.  They design the front page with a picture featuring an important event of the book. They also write about the CHARACTERS that appear (What happens?), the PLOT of the story (Who lives in the book?) the THEME (What is the book about at its heart?) and the SETTING (Where are we?). We use some graphic organizers to help students recognize those elements and provide a framework for writing the review. 

The programmable robots in our classes of programming and robotics.

The robots "Dash and Dot" that our students use in our robotic classes require a mobile or tablet to play and programme. There are several free apps for Dash and Dot all designed for specific learning. In our first robotic classes, we've used: Blocky, Path and Go.

Go

This app is the easiest to start with. You can interact with the robots, give instructions change LED colours, record your own sounds, drive Dash and get to know the robot.

Blockly

Blockly is the coding app, where you drag block and connect them to make Dash and Dot do things. Learning to code with a physical robot is fantastic, as you get immediate feedback on what you just created.

Path

This app uses a graphical interface to teach kids the concepts of robotics and coding. It is very visual and tactile as your kid draws a route for Dash on the tablet and gives commands.

For the first sessions, the students go through the user experience tutorial in the Blockly app. This tutorial will guide students through the different block types in the Blockly app, getting students familiar with programming in Blockly.

Once they have familiarised with the programming app, the teacher issues a small programming challenge for students to complete. Here are some Code examples for the challenges: