Hour of Code Coming Soon to Memorial School!

In an effort to teach our very young students how technology works, we will be joining in on the largest learning event in history: The Hour of Code. Memorial School's 1st graders will participate over the course of two weeks in December. Last year, 15 million students tried computer science during this event. This year, we're joining students worldwide to try to reach 100 million students!  How exciting!!

Dorothy Redding, our fabulous new library assistant, and I piloted teaching coding last week with a small group of students. I can honestly say, this was one of the very best and most fun teaching experiences I have ever had. The kids were completely engaged and super excited to learn how to code. They were planning, sequencing, being creative and much more. Watch the very short video below to see brand new coders helping each other :-)

1st graders learning how to code and helping each other 👍

A video posted by Randie Groden (@rgroden) on Nov 11, 2014 at 10:57am PST

For more information, watch this video from Code.org:

The Hour of Code can't come soon enough!

~ Randie Groden

Our Dot Day Celebration Wrap-up!

Here's a three minute video showing International Dot Day, Memorial-style!

Kids LOVED our Storybook Pumpkin Palooza!

Halloween is a favorite holiday at Memorial School. It's a time when everyone participates whether it's by reading a great Halloween book, marching in our Halloween Parade, enjoying a classroom Halloween Party or by making a pumpkin for our library's Storybook Pumpkin Patch!

Students, staff and parents loved seeing all the creativity in this year's Pumpkin Patch.  It's so fun to see which characters our students choose. Without further ado, here are this year's pumpkins:

We also started a Creepy Carrot Patch!

Can't wait to see how our Storybook Pumpkin Patch grows next year ;-)