The World Of Scratch in Second Grade

It's that time of year again.  Some people think Spring, but I know that it is actually a great time to introduce Scratch.  Scratch, as some of you may already know, is a program developed by MIT to help children learn the basics of computer programming.  While exploring animation through the use of blocks, children use creativity, problem solving and each other to make their visions come to life.  Scratch also offers wonderful opportunities to learn co-ordnates on a graph, the use of variables, speed and timing, audio recording, integers, the list goes on.  If you haven't had the opportunity to explore this program, I invite you to download it for free at home.
We start with having children animate the letters of their name.  This gives the students a chance to become familiar with the environment. We then move on to animating lunes, short poems the second graders create with Catalina.
Below is a sampling of some of the animations created in our class.  I've mixed in no particular order the name project and the lune project.  Due to limited space not all projects are posted.