Use your imagination!

In class today we have read the story of The Green Ship by Quentin Blake.   

We began by not knowing the title or author; only using the words and images. 

The story is written in the first person, from the point of view of a young boy with his sister or cousin Alice.  From the first few pages both children go exploring in search of an adventure. 

‘We plunged deeper and deeper into it.  We thought we were completely lost; then all at once we pushed aside a screen of branches and saw something absolutely astonishing.’

We were left on this cliff hanger!  From there we used our IMAGINATIONS to think of our own story and what was the ‘…something absolutely astonishing...’ that we saw. 

 We had a chance to add detail and discuss our story ideas and expand on them.

After reading the rest of The Green Ship, Mars went outside to forage for different materials (leaves, twigs) so that we could make our own version of a green ship or create our own story ideas. 

    

   

“Our Ice Castle is in Lolly Land, which comes from all our imaginations.” Isla, Olivia, Lanre, Iona. 

   

Using our images as a stimulus we wrote a descriptive paragraph that could be used in the story we would write.              

                   

“It was the most fun art project, linked with English, I have ever done. It has given me lots of ideas for the story.” Zoe

Mars Mazes - Computing

Mars class continued their hard work in creating Scratch programs these past weeks. Improving on our skills, we used sequencing and repetition to create programs that looped between actions and events, exploring the various tools and designs to create backgrounds and sprites. Working together, we were able to investigate the functions of different scripts (motion, looks, sound) and add these to our programs to enhance them. As we worked through creating our program, we found it helpful to stop and check to make sure the sequence was running in order.

We also explored using keyboard commands to stop and start our actions! We used these commands this week to create a maze activity to get our sprite to move in different directions using the arrow key functions. We used the event and motion blocks to direct the sprite through the maze.  

Venus Computing – Scratch program and debugging our projects                   03.02.2015

This week, we fine-tuned our Scratch programs! As we set out to run our programs, we ran into some common programming errors, such as sprites actions weren't functioning as we had planned and sequencing of events and motions were occurring in random order. We learned that make sure our programs were running in sequence, we had to test it out continuously as we made our algorithms. Working with each other, and sharing tools and ideas, we helped to solve  - debug – the errors we had in our programs. Debugging was added to our computing vocabulary knowledge!

Running our programs as we made changes to make sure we
were debugging errors as we went along

For those of us who’s programs ran in sequence, we extended our actions and events by adding in sound effects to enhance our work! We had to figure out how to loop the sound effects through each action in our program – we worked hard to improve our programs, sharing the skills with one another J

                                                                          

                                                                                                 Extending our projects to include more actions and sounds
‘Some of the programming was tough – my sprite kept doing the opposite of what I wanted! When I looked at how I made my events and actions, I realised where the program was telling the sprite to do the wrong thing’ – Mya