First of all, kudos to you for teaching Scratch to kids!

Vocabulary forms tokens that we can pass on to one another, and it is no coincidence that much of early childhood is spent with a parent telling a child, "this is a doorknob", and "this is a page". These identifiers allow us to early summon, link, and morph ideas. We organize our thinking around names.

Stephen H. Webb beautifully wrote:

Collecting, naming, and organizing things¯anything, from banana labels to dachshund paperweights¯seems to be built into human nature. At least, that’s what the Bible tells us. The first task God gave Adam was the naming of the animals. God “brought them to Adam to see what he would call them” and “the man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field” (Gen. 2:19“20). No matter how you imagine this scene, its meaning seems clear enough. The gift of language is what separates us from other species. We can name them, but they cannot name us.

Proper words will help your students enormously when they move on to their next programming language. Without that vocabulary as accessors to the ideas that they have understood in your workshop, they will have to independently make the connections by linking the underlying ideas. Only some of them will manage to do this. The others will have to relearn the ideas in the new context from scratch. (No pun intended.)

First of all, kudos to you for teaching Scratch to kids!

Vocabulary forms tokens of ideas that we can pass on to one another, and it is no coincidence that much of early childhood is spent with a parent telling a child, "this is a doorknob", and "this is a can opener". These identifiers allow us to summon, link, and morph ideas. We organize our thinking around names.

Stephen H. Webb beautifully wrote:

Collecting, naming, and organizing things¯anything, from banana labels to dachshund paperweights¯seems to be built into human nature. At least, that’s what the Bible tells us. The first task God gave Adam was the naming of the animals. God “brought them to Adam to see what he would call them” and “the man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field” (Gen. 2:19“20). No matter how you imagine this scene, its meaning seems clear enough. The gift of language is what separates us from other species. We can name them, but they cannot name us.

Proper words will help your students enormously when they move on to their next programming language. Without the vocabulary to act as accessors to the ideas that they have understood in your workshop, students will have to independently make connections by linking the underlying ideas. This is cognitively taxing, and only some of them will manage to do this. The others will have to relearn the ideas in the new context from scratch. (No pun intended.)