Week of Oct 23....

At Crittenden School, Auston led a group of Middle Schoolers through a session titled "Dance Party". Students were encouraged to create dance moves using costumes to create movement on screen. Our middle school students did a great job creating sprites that danced their way across the screen.

On Friday, we were back in Castro school tutoring second and third graders. Second graders led by Raghav played a game of Who am I ? We went into the classroom and played a number of math games from Plus 1 to games that tested addition facts to 20. Third graders spent their time  playing fraction, money and multiplication games.

We are starting to plan our end of the year activities. We will be hosting a Viewing Party to showcase our Fourth and Fifth grade buddies scratch projects on Thursday December 5. On Friday December 6, second and third graders will participate in a math carnival rotating between different math stations.

Week of Oct 17.....

We were back in Castro school working with 4th & 5th graders. 5th graders were working with their buddies on fractions, division and multiplication. We started with a round of bingo led by Neil S and then  Ian, Xilin, Rayan, Pratik, Auston and I  set up different game stations to work with the fifth graders. Our fifth graders had to brush up on their division and multiplying fractions. Our games helped provide much needed practice in these concepts.

Sreya along with Ashmita led the Scratch session for fourth graders. The All About me project was introduced to the fourth graders. Excited to create something that represented themselves, there were loud discussions, engaged conversations and many collaborations between the students to get the perfect background, a new sprite, motion blocks, text and sound to their project. Next week, Sreya will be organizing a walk through the All About Me projects so students can share and see what others have created.

Week of Oct 9th....

We were back in Crittenden Middle School to work with 6th, 7th & 8th graders. Auston lead both Scratch sessions to introduce the unit " All About Me". Students were encouraged to explore and work on a Scratch project that represented them through images and sound. Students were working collaboratively, helping each other find new ways to create a sprite, a background, a text, motion block, costumes. There were laughs, amazement and words of advice floating in the room about how to make the sprite change color or do some other "cool thing".

St Francis High School, Service Fair : Tuesday Oct 8

Two of our volunteers from St Francis High School, Skyler M & Aashika K. were representing Buddies4math at the Service Fair. They spent their time talking to other students about Buddies4math, showing a slide show of our session and sample games we use in our session. A shout out to them for their enthusiasm and efforts in getting sign ups for our thursday session. Thanks to their efforts we have a big pool of volunteers to help us on thursdays. A special thanks to Ms Frankovic from St Francis High School for inviting us to the Fair.

Week of October 3....

 Sreya led the Scratch tutoring session with fourth graders in the computer lab . Following the Scratch curriculum developed by Dr Brenan et al,  Sreya  introduced the "All About Me" unit to fifth graders. Ashmita & Harshini worked with fifth graders new to Scratch familiarizing them to different features of programing with Scratch.  The All About Me project asked students to create a program that represented them through images and sound. Students were shown sample projects and provided a rubric of what the project should include. Students worked together to explore how to add sound, text, motion, background and even paint a sprite.

In another classroom led by Neil S, fourth graders started with a game of multiplication bingo and then moved on to multiplication and fraction games. Thanks to the Gunn @ Your Service grant, the fourth and fifth graders have a new set of Fraction, Decimal & Percent games for our sessions.

Week of September 23rd....

Last week, we ran 3 tutoring sessions. Sreya & Auston led the Scratch session in Crittenden Middle School on Wednesday September 25 . With 50 minute rotations, they led a class of 6th, 7th & 8th graders through an introductory session of Scratch.  On Thursday Sept 26 in Castro school, Sreya introduced a class of 4th graders to Scratch for the very first time. Meanwhile, in a nearby classroom Neil S. lead a class of fifth graders through math games. On Friday, September 27 we had 28 tutors working with second and third graders. Eric, Raghav & Auston helped organize second grade session, while Wings, Ignat & Arundhati helped organize the third grade session. We have 17 new tutors join us this week from schools like St Francis, Cupertino High, Jordan, JLS, Terman, Gunn, Paly, Keys and St. Edward School.

A warm welcome to all our new tutors for deciding to spend their Thursday & Friday afternoons with us tutoring students in Castro Elementary School.