
For the past several years, I have done a shape drawing lesson with my first graders. We have drawn house, cars, castles, and rocket ships to name a few. This year I decided to add a Computer Science spin and ask the students to draw robots. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE how this project turned out!

I began the lesson by sharing the book Robots, Robots Everywhere! by Sue Fliess & Bob Staake (iTunes $2.99). I used the iBooks version which includes an audio recording of the story being read. I chose to manually turn the pages so we could talk about the different robots on the pages. I selected this book because of the shapes and colors used in the robot illustrations. I also liked the different robots shown. At least one student in every class, mentioned how they also had seen a "vacuum robot".
After the story, we talk about ways to draw a robot. I opened Kid Pix 3D and modeled using the shape and line tools to draw.

The students spent the rest of class drawing their robots. If they finished before other students, they went to their Code.org accounts and worked on solving computational thinking puzzles. I wanted to give all students ample time to draw.

During the next class, I introduced a robot poem to students. I made this poem up and really liked the balance between having the students copy a few lines and having them create a few lines in their poem.
Line 1: Robot, Robot,
Line 2: Uses code,
Line 3: Follows programs,
Line 4: Student shares what their robot can do.
Line 5: Student names their robot
I opened KidPix 3D and modeled writing the poem. We talk about using special keys on the keyboard (shift, delete, return) and sounding out words. I asked the students to copy lines 1-3 and add their own lines 4-5.
The above poem totally made me smile! I was also really pleased and excited to see how much my 1st graders had retained from their Kindergarten year. They remembered adding spaces between words, making capital letters, and so much more!
I plan to further tie this lesson to coding and computational thinking when we turn our classmates into robots and verbally code them around the room and when we use Dash and Dot robots.
I love when a lesson both informs and delights my students and myself! :)
