Song Lyric Flowcharts

Firstly, I have to start by thanking the fantastic @SteveBunce for this idea. He shared it a couple of year's ago when I saw him at Animate to Educate's Tech on the Tyne conference. I am very much looking forward to presenting their again this year.

So the idea here is that children take a song and break down the lyrics down into a flowchart. Using the repitition and patterns in songs, the children can start to consider the different symbols and links when creating a flow chart.

The idea is a great unplugged activity that can develop some computational thinking skills:


Here we are decomposing, abstractin, writing an algorithms with patterns.

We started by considering some other examples such as:




So my digital leaders gave it a go today and they loved it. Here are some of their examples. Once created, the children then snapped a picture of their efforts and using the app Shadow Puppets Edu, recorded a short video alongside the music following the flowchart they had created:










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Lovely Poem for Your Leavers Assembly

Image
I am always asked to put a little video together for our Year 6 show and end of year assembly. Each year, I always include a special poem that I finish the end of year video with. It is called Leaving School by Jade Hughes and it is beautiful: We've now left school, It's how the story ends, Tears of happiness is what we recommend,   It's what we say, But there's always a little pain, Because once you've left, It's not the same,   You could walk through school and you would see, Your friends who have grown up incredibly, But now you've gone, It's not the same, As you may never see them again,   Your friends who have grown up right beside you, Who have helped you through your daily strife, Will go ahead and leave behind them, You who wants the same old life,   But you can not live your life in the past, Hoping that the same memories will last, You have to move on and just be glad, That leaving has made you so sad, As this just shows that...
Keep reading

Using Disney Films for Geography!

Image
Last week I came across a tweet sharing this picture: I thought it would be a brilliant way for children to learn about the location of different countries around the world.  Before we looked at the map, I asked the class to list as many animated Disney films (excluding Pixar) as they could think of. We shared some of our ideas and discussed the origins of some of these stories. Some were books, others fairy tales, legends or folk tales.  This gave us a link with Literacy to discuss different types of stories, how most films are derived from written texts and also looking at some famous authors. We also talked about whether they could remember where in the world the film was set.  I then shared the map with the children and gave them time to look and see whether they knew any of the countries themselves. They had to make estimated guesses as to where they thought each film was set. After they had had a go at trying the name all the countries, they t...
Keep reading

Teaching Direct Speech Punctuation using the iPhone text messaging!

Image
Teaching direct speech is always a tricky aspect, there is so much to remember and very few useful visual pictures that clearly help children know what and how to use speech punctuation properly. Lets look at some of the tips to remember: The words that are spoken have to go within the speech marks. Any punctuation needs to also go inside the speech marks. A reporting clause, who and how they said it can go before, middle or end. A comma follows the reporting clause at the beginning. You need to start a new line when a new character speaks.  I think that is most of them?? I have heard of endless different ways to try and get children to remember these tips - keeping the sheeps in the pen  or speech mark sandwich  which are a couple of examples however they do not have any visual help for tips such as starting on a new line, which is something some of my children find hardest to remember.  I decided to use a different approach, to help cover the...
Keep reading