Planning the Lesson
Teaching interpretation of context through jokes, comics strips and stories
Having explored the basic use of Scratch I am now going to give you some ideas about how to utilize its powerful but simple tools and can be particularly effective when used to illustrate a topic that the class have been studying.
This lesson plan aims at teenagers aged 13. Scratch is often used when students are encouraged to work in pairs on projects that interest them both and engage and stimulate their interest so that they can put their skills to use in creating their own projects.
Objectives of the lesson:
Students will be able to predict, infer and draw conclusions from a limited context, referring to information that is available from their cultural, linguistic and situational context. They will have to explore Jokes, Comic strips or stories in order to investigate how context is sometimes limited. For this purpose, students are going to work in groups and will be using the app “Scratch’’ in order to create their own joke, comic or story and present their work to the rest of the class. • Students will be asked to bring along comic strips and jokes that they like. They will be allowed to produce their own if they wish. They will find out that they will have to resort to background knowledge or linguistic context to make sense of them.
• Next I will show using the app “Scratch’’ the first part of a joke. The students will have to infer what they think is going to happen and also draw conclusions about its ending.
• Finally and in groups they will be asked to create either a joke, comic strip or story.
This will take the following steps :
1- Brainstorming on the topic.
2- Writing the script collaboratively (They will have to design their sprites, backgrounds, layouts and text)
3- Using the “Scratch’’ app, design and create their program.
4- Post their work online then share them with the other groups and make comments on their peers’ work.
5- The final session can be used to create a multimedia presentation containing all the material created which can be viewed online.
Note: This is quite a big project so I think they should be given 1 week to prepare it
Below is a video showing a simple example of what the tool can produce
Comments