My Secret Obsession

I have a thing for elementary classrooms. While the idea of teaching the 12 and under crowd is in no way appealing, all the projects and circle time really sound fun.

Here are a few of my favorites:

This one we have used already this year. It is great for doing Octal and Hexadecimal numbers. It really gets the point across that hex and octal are a more compact way of storing large values. When you pull the cups apart you have the number written inside...I'll try to post a picture of the Hex-Cups to make that clearer.

We already do the Analog-Binary Calculators - which my kids call Flippy-Dos, so the cups have become Roley-Dos. And seriously - the flippy-do is the easiest way to show twos comp for negative numbers.

This would be great for showing the sequencing of code. My beginning students have a hard time sometimes getting the ordering of the commands. This could be a fun way to demonstrate how important the order is. They could work in pars with a whiteboard and follow each other's commands.

This project maps where a student is in their community. This is my next project for the CS Principles course. One of the my goals for the students is to understand that the Internet is a physical thing. My plan is to do these showing where they are on the Internet. They would be on the small circle in the middle - and then the structures that make up the Internet are on each of larger circles moving out.

This is a review game - the site includes the cards for the pockets. This would work well for AP style problems