Tech Club 12/6

I think if we asked the Whittier kids, they would say this was their favorite day of tech club so far.  Since it was our last day with them and since we made them do a bunch of typing the week before, we decided to give them the option of making music on Garage Band or painting on an online program.  Everybody chose Garage Band, and they all really enjoyed it.  Even though I was not super familiar with the program I was able to work my way around it OK and the kids were pretty good about figuring stuff out to.  Obviously we had them wear head phones while they worked on their creations, but at the end of the hour they got to share their songs with the group.  It was obvious they were very excited about and proud of their work.  A few of them were asking about where to get the program so they could have it at home.  It was a really fun last day of tech club, and was probably the most focused I have ever seen them.

Tech Club 11/29

We wanted the kids to practice typing this week, so we had them play typing games on learninggamesforkids.com.  This was a new site we hadn't used yet so there were some unexpected issues (it  could get really slow, some of the games were boring for the kids).  We only had 4 students this week so it was pretty manageable, which was good because there was a lot of whining and complaining about having to do typing games which is obviously none of their favorite thing to do.  However, it is also something they definitely need to work on so I am glad we had them do it.  I did differentiate for the one 4th grader we had in the club, she was kind of beyond the games the rest of them were playing so to practice her typing as well as her English knowledge I had her create some online mad libs and had her read them out loud to me as well.  It was kind of rewarding because I did feel like it helped solidify some concepts for her (verbs, nouns, plurals, etc.)