Conquering History With Scratch

We just finished studying the Battle of Hastings and the Norman invasion of Great Britain.  Our fourth grader was assigned to write a biography on William the Conqueror as way to wrap up her study of this material.  Needless to say, her enthusiasm level was not high.  She slipped into deep thought for a minute and asked, "Can I do it with Scratch?"   I know there is a time and place for writing biographies and I am not arguing the fact this is a necessary skill to acquire.  However, being that this is history class, I thought this might work.  As a matter of fact, I thought it might be fun to take an old idea and give it a techie twist.  This is one of many advantages to living in the Age of Web 2.0. 

For those of you who are not familiar with Scratch, it is a free programming language targeted at middle-school students created by the Lifelong Kindergarten program at MIT.  It is a definite favorite at our house!  For her to do this project, she had to apply logic, critical thinking, math, as well as, her knowledge of William the Conqueror.  She chose to create an interactive report where you simply click on buttons to take you to the different content areas.  Each page has a "home" button to return you to the start page.  As you can see, this was a more challenging project than simply writing a biography.  To quote Frost, she took the "road less travelled."

Check out her Scratch program by clicking on the image.

Also, I'm sharing a few of our favorite sites we used during our study of the Norman Conquest of England.

History Resources:

• The Norman Invasion- Woodlands Junior School Kent
• The Battle of Hastings 1066
• The Normans
• The Normasn (Powerpoint)
• Bayeux Tapestry
• The Normans- BBC
• The Norman Conquest- History for Kids
• Castles for Kids- Interactive

If your thirsting for more, check out Thirsty Thursday for other resources and ideas. Enjoy!