Talking about the weather with Scratch

Special information

The project aims to teach vocabulary items, especially that on weather and free time activities. The activity was designed for beginners and doesn’t need any previous experience in working with Scratch.

Step by step overview

Warm up: The teacher tells the students the aim of the activity is to create a Scratch project about weather and free time activities related to different types of weather. Start off with an usual warm up and try to get students to talk about seasons. Ask students what seasons they like best and see if anyone can explain why. This could elicit much of the vocabulary you plan to practise during the lessons. If vocabulary words come up, write them on the board. Introduce: Introduce the weather related vocabulary using weather flashcards. Some basic words you may want to include are “sunny”, “cloudy”, “raining”, “snowing”, “hot”, “cold”. Presentation: At this phase you want them to produce some material on their own. At first encourage your students to draw in Scratch all four seasons. Invite students to use appropriate colors so that their drawings can match a particular season. Once they have finished drawing in Scratch ask students to describe in English what they’ve drawn. Give students the opportunity to look at the blocks “Events” and “Looks”, then ask them which block would be useful to make the sprite say something.

Ask two students to come in front of the class and speak about their favorite and least favorite season. You can also ask them tell the class what they like to do when it’s sunny, cloudy, raining and so on. This will give them a bit of writing practice. Then ask all the students to write in Scratch what they have just said. Pay attention to them in order to see if they can perform the task. If there are any problems, ask one child to explain how it is done. If there are still problems, ask a student show all the other pupils how it is done on an overhead projector.

Tips to make the workshop go smoothly

You have to make sure pupils match the backdrop (the season) with the description they’re making. They need to know how to work with the picture editor menu in order to be able to create the backdrops they need for the overall project.

Extensions and challenges

As an extension you can ask the student to create dialogues about the clothes of the sprites. The students can also change the color of the sprite’s clothes. They can also add motion. The workshop can be changed so as to cover all levels of teaching English as a second language (beginner, intermediate, low-intermediate, upper-intermediate, advanced).

Sources of additional information

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/97657342/ https://scratch.mit.edu/help/