Week 4: A little more open ended

Last week, we were pretty good about keeping the kids focused and on task, and I think we were helped by having very specific plans for them.

This week -- not so much.

With regards to the Vietnam collaboration we brought up in our last post, our contact set up a Google site for us that can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/olpcneedhamvietnam/

Anyway, without letter writing to get the kids focused on a uniform task this week at the onset, I feel like we made it difficult to get them on the same page later. Any suggestions for small 10-15 minute exercises/activities to engage them?

Some kids settled down and went back to their TurtleArt name-writing activities -- the ones that took to it have really gone for it! Two of our fifth graders are almost finished, and it's fascinating to see how they work with the program since it can be pretty inefficient. One kid piled a bunch of his frequently used blocks in the lower corner as he worked so he wouldn't have to keep scrolling back up. The two kids (of the seven) that were actively working on the name-writing project got to learn about the 'action' blocks, though I'm pretty sure they're still a bit away from grasping the concept of encapsulating commands into a function :P
It was also super cute -- both kept asking the others, "Hey, are you going to try writing your name in TurtleArt?"

One response they did get was, "No, it's too hard for me."
Dear readers, do you have any advice for us as to how we might be able to re-engage some of these students?

(On the other hand, we did take a little mini-foray into TamTam today, and came out with a pretty fun remix of the Star Wars theme from an unexpectedly musically talented kid! We'll try to obtain a recording for next time!)