Hello,
Our school will be using VEX GO as a special rotation for grades 2-5. All students will go to STEM special once a week for 45 minutes. I’d like grades 2-5 to be doing different units/lessons so when they graduate on to the next grade, they are not doing the same thing. Does anyone else do something like this? If so, how did you decide which lessons to teach to what grades? Thanks!
Hi Sara,
Welcome to the PD+ Community! It’s great that all of your students will be using GO once a week!
Assuming that all of your students are starting from scratch with building and coding, I think it makes sense to start all your students in the same place, and then branch off from there.
We have an introductory STEM Lab, Intro to Building, that you can use to introduce students to the pieces in the GO Kits and get them comfortable with using them to build. With 45 minutes a week, this will likely take you about 6 weeks if you do all the Labs in the Unit.
We also have several VEX GO Activities that you can use to supplement their introduction to GO if needed, such as our Discovery Activities, which help students build spatial reasoning skills.
Once your kids are familiar with how to build, then you could split them up by grade level. On this page: teachgo.vex.com we have three scope and sequences that you could use as a starting point, and adapt them to your particular situation. One is primarily coding focused, one primarily building focused, and one is a mix of both. They do have some overlapping activities, but you could swap them out as needed. The VEX GO Pacing Guides found on this page will be helpful for this as well!
Feel free to check back in with any questions you might have after checking out these resources!
Hi @Sara_Colvin - Welcome to the PD+ Community! I agree with @Aimee_DeFoe - definitely start everyone off with the same introduction. In Lab 1 of Intro to Building (and linked in many GO Labs) is a PDF Storybook - Get Ready, Get VEX, GO! with a Teacher’s Guide that is designed to introduce students to the GO Kits, the pieces, and how they fit together, as well as some of the things they can get excited about doing with the GO Kit.
The end of the story walks you through a first build to have students begin to find and connect pieces in their Kits together.
This is a great way to get everyone a shared foundation, and the Teacher’s Guide will give you prompts to make the story interactive and engage students in discussion while you’re reading.
Something else that I wanted to mention is that some teachers find that focusing on either building OR coding with different grade levels is helpful. For instance, you could focus on building with your 2nd and 3rd graders, then focus more on coding with the 4th and 5th graders. The scope and sequences Aimee mentioned in her post would be a great way to scaffold this.
And if you’d like to talk more about planning out your curriculum, schedule a 1-on-1 Session and we can walk through some options together to help you get started 
