After briefly reviewing what we did together the previous week (see Lesson #1), I showed my students how to animate their characters. The most important recommendation was to keep the movement and animation scripts separate from each other. All we used was a "next costume" block and a "wait __ secs" block.

After animating some of our fish, I showed them how to play sounds. We added a bubbling sound effect to the fish tank, and we made one of our fish make noise as he swam. Again, the recommendation was to make the sound script separate from the other scripts so they wouldn't interfere with one another.

When the students went to try this out on their own there was more confusion than from the previous week. For animation, most of the confusion seemed to stem from confusion between Sprites and Costumes. For sounds, many students got sidetracked on just listening to all the sounds available or else began trying to record their own sounds. Either way some of them forgot how to use the sounds once they had what they wanted. There was also a small percentage of students who were absent for Lesson 1 and they were definitely unsure of what to do.

All said, after two weeks, Scratch is still a hugely engaging program which has really captured the interest of most of the 4th and 5th graders I am teaching it to.

I decided for lesson three to slow down a bit and allow the students to explore some of what is possible with Scratch. More on that soon...