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In my library, we’re a little obsessed with coding.  We’ve been working on a project to introduce computational thinking and free coding resources to kids called Coder Time. For over a year, we’ve been searching for ways to teach our audience some complex ideas by experimenting with apps, activities, and lesson plans to create library programs (you can learn more about it here). While these programs were always for our older kids and tweens, we’ve been amazed at our youngest participants’ enthusiasm to jump right in. As we work with this age group, we keep finding overlap between coder concepts and early literacy skills.  For example, play teaches symbolic thinking, a skill important for both reading and coding.  Narrative skills help children understand story structure, but also strengthen computational thinking.  I’ve recently started incorporating coding concepts into my preschool storytimes.  After some trial and error and a mobbed flannel board, here’s what I have in the works:

Coder Values: Collaboration, perseverance, imagination, it’s all about attitude!  My favorite book for this is Today I Will Fly! by Mo Willems.  Partner with your parachute and kids can work as a team to make Gerald, or your elephant puppet, soar.

Algorithms: An algorithm is the set of instructions you follow to complete a task.  Understanding this is the first step in writing a program.  I’m using Lois Ehlert’s Growing Vegetable Soup to introduce the seed planting activity found in Course One of Code Studio. I also adapted their “Happy Maps” activity for use with a magnetic whiteboard. In a very simple maze of boxes, we help Bingo find his bone.  Apps like Kodable and Lightbot Jr. are too advanced for my preschool audience, so this lets me control the level of difficulty, and give the kids a more tactile experience.

Conditionals: Conditionals are pieces of code that only run when certain conditions are met.  They are the If/Then parts of coding.  A good introduction is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff.  In looking for other ways to teach this, I found Linda Liukas’s Hello Ruby’s paper dolls. This inspired me adapt our “Teddy Wears a Red Shirt” flannel board. Teddy’s wardrobe has grown to include pajamas, yellow boots and a bathing suit.  If it’s raining, Teddy wears his rain boots all day long.

Photo taken by the author of this blog post.

Throughout this process, our approach has always been to give families a taste of the possibilities that are out there, and help them discover that coding can be fun and accessible regardless of your background. As a result, a lot of these are variations on program staples.  If you have ideas for other ways of integrating coding into programming for preschoolers, please share!

Brooke Sheets is Children’s Librarian at Los Angeles Public Library’s Children’s Literature Department and is writing this post for the Early Childhood Programs and Services Committee. 

The post Coding Concepts for Preschoolers appeared first on ALSC Blog.

Photo by Sylvia Aguinaga

Why code

I’m Mexican-American and grew up with very traditional, hard-working parents who constantly reminded me of the importance of creating a stable future for my family and myself. As an ALSC Special Populations Committee member, my job is to make sure programming remains inclusive—reaching all children and informing all parents, including the Spanish-speaking.

In order for Spanish-speaking parents to support and encourage their child to learn to code, they must first understand the importance of code in today’s world. That is why it is critical to provide approachable Spanish-language resources and craft a clear message.

In the advertising world, they say a good ad communicates one benefit of the product. As copywriter Luke Sullivan puts it, Jeep = rugged, Porsche = fast, “and Volvos, they’re…what? If you said ‘safe,’ you’ve given the same answer I’ve received from literally every other person I’ve ever asked. Ever.”

What can we say about code?

It’s an intimidating question: code is so many things; in our daily lives, code is seemingly behind everything. That’s why it’s so important to teach kids – and it’s also why it’s so difficult to explain to their parents.

There’s one benefit of learning code that can stand out to our audience, parents who care deeply about their children’s future.

Code is money.

More than 1.7 million programmer-specific job opportunities will be available in 2022, with average salaries over $83,000. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) jobs are the fastest growing in the U.S. with 71% of these jobs involving computers.

Promising children an opportunity to learn code could be the most effective way to promise them a future. Once we communicate this clearly to parents, they will be interested. They’ve always wanted a future for their children.

As children’s librarians, this has been our goal all along too. Literacy = opportunity.

What you can do

If you slam a kid in a chair and make them stare at a wall of code – a black screen filled with ///{“symbols”;} and cryptic jargon – they’ll likely react like any of us: “what?”

Fortunately, there are tons of great resources for bringing digital literacy to children.

My favorite is Scratch. Scratch is a free programming language for kids (ages 8 and up) that lets you create games, music, and animations. It is visual-based. Kids drag and drop different elements, and link them together like Legos.

Essentially, introductory languages like Scratch get children thinking in a code mindset. Not only working logically, but playfully – learning to tinker, examine, explore.

The past few months I’ve partnered with Joanna Fabicon, a Children’s Librarian at Los Angeles Public Library, to help develop Coder Time (see resources linked below!). Coder Time is a weekly coding club launching this month at the Central Library and in after-school programs at elementary schools across L.A. Our goal is to inspire kids to do meaningful things with computers.

Each “chapter” of the Coder Time curriculum is paired with books that will encourage kids to explore their library and discover content that will in turn inspire them to make something they will love.

Another big goal of Coder Time is to empower librarians to facilitate their own coding workshops by using librarian-gathered and curated content. Coder Time materials are licensed under a Creative Commons license that lets you tweak and adapt content to your own community.

To truly bring digital literacy to children, we need library-created content and programs. Often, librarians outsource coding workshops to experts. Though well-intentioned and certainly helpful, these workshops don’t do enough to serve our public. Like reading, coding is a practice, a way of being in the world. Coding programs need to be a regular, fully integrated part of the library – not something tacked on just to cover the bases.

For this to happen, librarians need to be comfortable with and familiar with code. But as programs like Scratch show, this is no obstacle. You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to—as you ask of your young patrons—be willing to learn.

Beyond $

Like reading, the benefits of coding are deeper than money. Coding gives children a creative way of looking at the world. It empowers them to make, rather than passively consume. It encourages them to work together.

With a clear message, our voice can be heard by parents. In turn, all children can make their voices heard with technology.

Resources

Code for Parents (Spanish)

Code for Parents (English)

Coder Time Zine (English)

Sylvia Aguiñaga, LSSPCC Committee Member

The post Code for Parents appeared first on ALSC Blog.

Brendan Reichs, co-writer of the YA Fiction Virals series, shares with us some insights, favorites, and confessions of his dynamic author life.

I'm not sure what's going on, but yesterday my second post for Amy didn't post. For some reason it saved as a draft instead of a pre-scheduled post. It could have been my error, but I'm not so sure.

On my DKV Writing 4 U site, yesterday I lost my home page text and right sidebar - completely gone!

And, I lost the page that held the free offer for the site. CRAZY!

So, I spent most of the day redoing the DKV site. I'm still missing the right sidebar when going to it from IE. I'm thinking the code for the subscribe form must be in word doc. I'll have to delete that and reinstall it using Notepad text.

AHHGGG

Before I redid the DKV site, I went to this cool site that actually gives you any errors in your html for your site. I had 129 errors and 10 warnings. Unfortunately, I don''t know how to fix the errors, but it's interesting to know.


Here's the site: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.lasventions.com/index.php

“See https://code.nla.gov.au/ for open source code from the National Library of Australia” [thanks roy]

Dale Askey has written a great column on how libraries “share and fail to share open source software” and looks into some of the reasons that might be the case.

Elvim Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.

In recent weeks, some political commentators have observed that Senator Barack Obama is all talk, but no substance. Where his supporters see an orator of the highest order, his detractors see only a smooth talker.

Flash back to the 1980s, and we had the same bifurcated response to Ronald Reagan. Whereas some saw profundity and deep meaning in his speeches, Reagan’s detractors heard only vacuous platitudes. Indeed, Reagan’s supporters even used the same words as some liberals do today to describe Obama’s “soaring oratory.” How did Reagan score with the Reagan Democrats? By being all things to all people. The Obamacans in this year’s elections are being swayed by a parallel strategy. Talk a lot, but mean nothing.

Consider Obama’s response this week in Georgia when he addressed charges that he had been “flip flopping” between his positions : “I’m not just somebody who is talking about government as the solution to everything. I also believe in personal responsibility. I also believe in faith.” the Senator sagely declared.

But who doesn’t believe in faith? Such rhetoric misses the point, ending rather than initiating debate - a strategy consummately deployed by President Bush in selling “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by exploiting our universal and creedal belief in liberty. The question is how we should balance our respect for the identity and autonomy of religious charities with our belief in the separation of church and state. And the question is whether freedom in Iraq can and should be bought with the sacrifice of our freedoms at home and the suspension of some of our constitutional principles. By design, Obama’s and Bush’s words elided these difficult, but pressing questions.

“I also believe in personal responsibility” are also coded words Obama’s speechwriters designed to woo conservative audiences without explicitly repudiating the liberal point of view that governmental programs are the other side of the rhetorical equation that ought to have been addressed. Reverend Jesse Jackson was understandingly aggravated. Yet while Jackson has apologized for his crude verbal gaffe, we have yet to take Obama to task for his rhetorical sleight of hand because this is what we have come to expect from political candidates seeking the highest office of the land.

We are not going to face the complex problems of our time if our would-be leaders continue to take the rhetorical path of least resistance, to buy our assent without any content. To say nothing even when one talks a lot is to fulfill the rhetorical formula for, literally, empty promises. There were times in this election season when Obama rose above the anti-intellectual fray, just like there were times when Ronald Reagan and George Bush used the bully pulpit to educate rather than to merely seduce the American people. This year, when conservatives see in a liberal political candidate the same rhetorical flaws as what liberals saw in Reagan and George Bush, perhaps we will come closer to recognizing a systemic flaw in our political system, and it is the Anti-intellectual Presidency.

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On Monday, I reviewed The Discovery and Mystery of a Dinosaur Named Jane by Judith Williams. It's about a group of palentologists who discover an amazing dinosaur while digging in Montana.

Dinosaurs seem to fascinate many children, so here are some lesson plans and other dinosaur-themed activities I found on the web if you want to teach your child more about dinosaurs.

Dinosaur Lesson Plans: A big list of activities and lesson plans for kids, including "How To Write a Funny Dinosaur Poem," and "Make a Sock-A-Saurus."

Dinosaur Mini-Unit for Kindergartners: Contents of this mini-unit include an introduction to fossils, palentologists, and dinosaurs; some really fun art activities; and more.

Dinosaur Prints: An art project where children can make and paint their own print of a dinosaur using a picture from a book or magazine.

Dinosaur Art Activities: A teacher shares three dinosaur-themed art activities she's completed with her students.

Dinosaur Bodies: A lesson from National Geographic for grades K-2 that encourages kids to think about and learn how animals used their bodies and how dinosaurs might have used theirs.

Dinosaur Detectives: A comprehensive lesson for children in grades 6-8 that helps them learn more about palentologists.

Note that I found TONS of information, so what I'm listing now is just a small sample of what's out there.

Nonfiction Monday:
The Discovery and Mystery of a Dinosaur Named Jane by Judith Williams

Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc. (March 1, 2007)

Ever since I was a child, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and paleontology. I often wondered what it would feel like to be the scientist who discovered a dinosaur after grueling work. Well, The Discovery and Mystery of a Dinosaur Named Jane finally gives me some insight.

The book begins with paleontologists and volunteers from the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois discovering a toe bone while digging in Montana. It was unfortunately, the end of their season, so they covered up the site where they were digging, hoping that no one else found the rest of the dinosaur until they could come back the NEXT YEAR!

Luckily, the site was untouched, and they were able to dig up the bones of a magnificent dinosaur who they named Jane. But what kind of Dinosaur is Jane? They believe she’s a tyrannosaur, but is she a nanotyrannus or an infamous T-Rex? Or is she a new species altogether? One thing is clear—this is an amazing discovery and the biggest one yet for the small museum.

Judith Williams gives a detailed description of the laborious work the paleontologists performed to successfully dig up the dinosaur bones. Readers even get a glimpse of the common tools paleontologists use. Once the bones are removed and transported back to the museum, readers learn all of the work that was involved with cleaning, repairing, and putting the bones together and all of the research required to determine what type of dinosaur Jane is.

What’s refreshing about this book is that it’s different than the typical kid’s book that features glorious images of dinosaurs and awe-inspiring facts. Instead, it’s a book that really focuses on the discovery of a dinosaur and gives readers insight into the hard work that’s involved in getting a magnificent dinosaur on display in a museum. Children will learn to respect this work along with the creature that one roamed the earth.

With interesting pictures and photographs of the dig site and of the work in progress, this is a great find for a kid who is interested in dinosaurs and paleontology. Heavier on text than pictures, it’s more suitable for a proficient reader.