The last days of 2011 are counting down, and it’s likely that your days in the classroom for 2011 are even fewer! As you’re planning for the last days of the calendar year, consider using ReadWriteThink interactives for one of these fun, winter activities:
Use the Resume Generator to create a resume for a character from a favorite story or song. What would Scrooge list on his resume?
Compose Shape Poems with the bus for the last day of school. Students can talk about all the things they hope to do during the winter break—after they ride home on the school bus for the last time in 2011.
Have students map significant personal events they remember from previous winter holidays with the Graphic Map.
Write a class alphabet book of activities to try during the winter holidays with the Alphabet Organizer.
Ask students to think of a favorite event that happens during the winter break, and compose Acrostic Poems about it.
Create Character Trading Cards for characters from winter-themed or holiday-themed books or songs. Imagine a trading card for the Baby New Year!
Reflect on all that has happened since the start of the school year in a class newspaper, created with the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.
Explore school days and winter vacation in a Diamante Poem that unites the two opposing topics.
Use the Profile Publisher to mock up social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, or newspaper or magazine profiles for characters from winter-themed or holiday-themed books or songs. What would Frosty the Snowman list on his Facebook profile?
Interactive whiteboard redefine hands-on activity in the classroom, as students manipulate information on a giant digital display. They also bring teachers a new challenge: what activities can you use to make the most of this new technology?
What do Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter have in common? How do they differ from Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand, Michael Moore, Andrew Breitbart, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Michael Savage? A Rebel Pundit survey last month asked, “Which of these books would you be interested in having banned, if you could have books banned?”
The results were overwhelmingly in favor of banning the books of Palin, Beck and Coulter, though the math of the survey is a little confusing since the results don’t add up to 100%. That said, what’s going on here?
Rebel Pundit’s reporter set up on the street in Chicago, during the Printers Row Literary Festival. As these alleged book lovers passed by the reporter, he asked them which books they’d like banned, telling them they could ban up to three, and handing them a Sharpie so they could make tick marks under their choices. Before I go on, watch the Rebel Pundit video of folks participating in the survey:
Sadly, people take the marker and willingly step up to the poster. The editing of the video suggests the participants aren’t really thinking much. They don’t even interact much with the reporter, other than taking the Sharpie from his hand.
In fairness, Rebel Pundit does explain that there were naysayers:
Nine people explicitly stated to us they thought banning books was wrong, including two individuals who voted on the board but later approached us to say, (paraphrasing) “I think I made a mistake, and wanted to take my votes back if I could, because after further reflection, I think banning any book is wrong.”
Only nine people of 147 protested the idea of banning books. Of course, the point of the survey isn’t really book banning. It’s to demonstrate that people make choices without thinking.
My hunch is that the reporter expected people to vote unthinkingly. Rebel Pundit is a conservative blog. According to their About page, they are “a beacon of truth, showing the unholy alliance of the local mainstream media and the progressive Democratic Party.” Since Chicago is a traditionally liberal town, the video and related article depict the people of Chicago as foolish lemmings:
While there were in fact less than two handfuls of individuals who did tell us they don’t think any books should be banned, unfortunately there were a shocking amount of guests at this book fair who were quite open to the idea, and in fact lined up quite excited for the opportunity to voice their opinion.
Given the audience of the Rebel Pundit site, the site likely guessed that their readers would draw the connections that the liberal democrats at the book festival were actually interested in limiting individual freedoms by stepping up happily to ban books. You don’t need to read many of the comments to see that it worked.
How to Use the Video in the Classroom
Because of the way that people blindly choose to ban books, the video can be a useful part of class discussion of censorship and book banning. Though it’s a tempting idea, I would not set up a classroom or school survey to trap students into similar behavior. I want students to think critically about censorship, and I don’t think labeling them as unthinking is a good way to do that.
Instead, I want to play the video for students and ask them what they think is happening. Why are the participants so willing to participate in this book banning activity? I want them to identify how much thought is going into the participants’ decisions and how much peer pressure and the public nature of the survey contribute to participation. I’ll also ask students to look at the setup of the survey. It’s just a simple tick mark on a piece of poster paper. Does that simplicity or the presence of the reporter influence them to participate?
I don’t think the decision to add a vote to the poster is part of some great political agenda, so I will downplay those connections at the beginning of the discussion. When the political aspect of the survey does come up, and I’m sure it will, I’ll ask students to think about how the choice of books and the setting for the survey were part of the reason people were eager to ban the books on the poster. What would happen if the same survey were set up in a conservative town or event?
There are also questions of graphic design to consider: does the layout of book covers on the poster play a part in the response? What would happen if the books are arranged differently on the poster or if the choices were shared only with words (without those very identifiable faces on the book covers)? If the survey itself were presented some other way, would the decision to participate be different?
After all this discussion, I’m thinking of introducing a research project on book banning. Students can research censorship events, like Nazi book burning to more recent censorship of bloggers in countries like China and Egypt. The focus can be widened to include films, songs, and other texts as well. Research questions like these could inspire papers or presentations:
How does peer pressure contribute to participation in book burnings?
What other persuasive devices were involved?
Are there political agendas at play in the choice of what has been banned?
Does the fact that just one book is banned simplify participation?
Who decided what was banned? What motives were at play?
If I decide not to go with a research activity, I may stick with the survey itself and ask students to write short responses that they’d give if they were asked, “Which books would you ban?” Answers can be anything from a 140-character Twitter posts to a video response or PowerPoint presentation. The resulting pieces can be part of public service announcement campaign during Banned Books Week.
You probably would have guessed that raven was one of the most frequently used words in Poe’s “The Raven,” but the Wordle word cloud on the right makes the impact of that word visually obvious. Wordle is a free tool that can make a word cloud out of any text that is pasted into a form or by using the text on a webpage. It includes some choices for formatting, so that you can change the color and layout of the words. You can also omit commonly used words. The final cloud can be printed or saved.
Last week, Edutopia shared some ideas for using Wordle in the classroom, as part of their New Teacher Boot Camp. In addition to checking out the Edutopia resources, take a look at these blog posts for more ideas on using word clouds for reading and writing activities in the classroom:
This week in Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim asserts, “The world is divided into two types of people: those who prefer Track Changes in Word and those who prefer to write collaboratively in Google Docs.” Kim’s explanation of the two ways of working with text sparked conversation on the TechRhet discussion list. Some spoke to Kim’s explicit question: “Which one are you?” while others extended the focus to consider different ways to write HTML texts.
Naturally, there’s no correct answer to Kim’s question, and the situation is not as binary as it is presented in his article. That ambiguous quality makes the article and its overarching question perfect for a class discussion of collaboration and teamwork. Students can share their own alignment, and then move on to talk about how Kim’s article is defining writing and collaboration. They can widen the discussion of writing and collaboration to include more tools and kinds of composing. With that groundwork in place, they can then talk about their own teamwork in class. Focus their conversation on how different kinds of collaboration suit different projects and ask them to brainstorm strategies for working together when you have different preferences.
Kim’s article is short, but it touches on how software, teamwork, and how people collaborate—all valuable topics for the classroom.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for July 3. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about Food in Fiction and How Cooking Brings You Closer to Characters this week in The Atlantic. The article asks readers to think about how cooking and eating the same foods as fictional characters strengthens the connection between reader and the text.
Rosenberg describes some lemon cakes she made as a connection to Sansa, a character the books by George R.R. Martin that are the basis of HBO’s Game of Throne:
The cakes weren’t anything like I’d imagined from reading about them in the book—they were spongier and less sweet, and hard to imagine as a dreamed-of delicacy. But they were delicious, a powerful visceral connection to the people on screen and the world in which they live.
Such connections between reader and text reminded me of the potential writing about food has in the composition classroom. Jay Dolmage has written two entries this year that include assignments and discussion ideas. Take a look back at Writing About Food and Food Rules for ways you can connect with students just as Rosenberg connects with those fictional characters.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for June 26. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
When learning stops during the summer, students suffer from what is referred to as the summer slide—a loss of ability and knowledge from the close of school in the spring to the reopening in the fall.
Take advantage of the long summer days, and prevent summer learning loss with Thinkfinity’s fun, interactive games and activities. In addition to online games and engaging summertime activities, you’ll find recommended reading lists as well as a discussion forum where parents and educators can interact.
For a review of the resources on ReadWriteThink, watch the new Engaging Students After School and at Home video, and check out the calendar entries, lesson plans, and classroom activities below for more classroom and summer ideas. Have a great week!
June 6: Celebrate Cynthia Rylant’s birthday! Students work in small groups or as a class to map the plot of a selected Cynthia Rylant story and create original literary works using the plot diagrams. (For grades K–8)
June 7: Poet Nikki Giovanni was born in 1943. Using the poem “My First Memory (of Librarians),” students connect memory, their senses, and the language of poetry. (For grades 1–12)
June 8: Commercial ice cream is first sold in the U.S. in 1786. After finding advertisements from the past, students evaluate them and discuss how ads have changed over the years. Students then create an advertisement for a new flavor of ice cream. (For grades 5–12)
Look ahead to next week for lesson plans and activities on Anne Frank’s diary, Flag Day, and the birthdays of author Brian Jacques and Chris Van Allsburg.
It’s the time of year when spelling exotic words that you’d never use in day-to-day communication is all the rage. The final rounds of the Scripps Spelling Bee take place, with daily coverage on ESPN.
As I wrote in an NCTE Inbox blog post a couple of years ago, the problem is that while spelling has apparently become prime time entertainment, spelling bees still aren’t good pedagogy. A 2007 Washington Post article explains that spelling bees provide limited support to students learning about words and the ways that they work. Sue Ann Gleason, the teacher quoted in the article explains the spelling bees “honor the children who already know how to spell, but they do little to support those who need explicit instruction.”
So while the Spelling Bee may get kids and their families interested in spelling for a few days, take a look at the spelling lesson plans and activities on ReadWriteThink for ways to support every student (not just the ones who can spell funny words like weissnichtwo. And check out the calendar entries, lesson plans, and classroom activities below for more classroom-ready ideas. Have a great week!
New Resources
Listen to the most recent podcasts on ReadWriteThink:
Are your budding scientists eager to discover what makes plants grow? Check out The Science of Spring from Science NetLinks and watch students’ imaginations bloom.
Inspire students with some summer reading activities:
May 31: Today is Walt Whitman’s birthday. Students write and illustrate their own children’s stories using the text from a Walt Whitman poem. (For grades 7–12)
June 1: CNN debuted as the first television news network in 1980. Students brainstorm a list of modern news sources and from previous centuries. Groups then research one of these sources and create a timeline showing the evolution of news. (For grades 3–12)
June 3: Jesse James robs the Obocock Bank in 1871. Students listen to folksongs and related information about Jesse James, and then research James’ life and write new folk songs about James or another famous outlaw. (For grades 3–12)
Look ahead to next week for lesson plans and activities on the Crystal Palace, the first sale of ice cream, and the birthdays of authors Cynthia Rylant and Nikki Giovanni.
Now that classes are nearly over, it’s that time when I begin reflecting on the year and deciding which activities I want to be sure to try again next year. I try to think of the resources that surprised me or particularly engaged students.
One of my favorites is Cooking Up Descriptive Language: Designing Restaurant Menus. It gave students a chance to compose menus that reflected their family and cultural backgrounds, and they were able to learn more about text design and layout. I’ll definitely try it again, and I’m considering other possibilities for the activity, like using it as a book report alternative by asking students to create a menu for a restaurant that characters in a novel visit (or might visit). It was definitely a keeper!
For more great classroom activities, check out the calendar entries, lesson plans, and classroom activities below for this week. Have a great week!
New Resources
Share the stories of war, sacrifice and honor of these heroic women and men with your students with this special collection of lessons, interactives and resources on Honoring Our Military.
Help students understand the science of spring with lessons and activities from Thinkfinity.org, including The Science of Spring from Science NetLinks.
Explore the universe with your students. Launch rockets, explore planets and test gravity with lessons and interactive tools.
May 22: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood premiered in 1967. After thinking about TV shows, books, and movies from their childhood, students write about what they remember and revisit how they feel about it at an older age. (For grades 7–12)
May 23: Author Scott O’Dell was born on this day. Students select a set of books to read and compare fiction and nonfiction books and discuss their findings as a class. Students can follow up by writing short stories about the topics they explored.(For grades 5–12)
May 24: The Brooklyn Bridge opened on this day in 1883. Students explore the literary concept of point of view by examining a pair of picture books that highlight the controversies surrounding the Brooklyn Bridge. (For grades 5–12)
May 25: Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803. Students visit a quotation attributed to Emerson and identify the definition of success. Students then use the Postcard Creator to write a note to a person that they feel is successful. (For grades 7–12)
May 27: On this day in 1907, Rachel Carson was born. Students learn about Rachel Carson, explore different environmental websites, and write a Diamante Poem about a particular habitat. (For grades 3–12)
Look ahead to next week for lesson plans and activities on Memorial Day, the National Spelling Bee, the debut of CNN, Jesse James, and Walt Whitman.
Connecting with Other Teachers
Join the Parents & Families group in the Thinkfinity Community to connect with other parents, ask questions from our guest teachers, and learn more about Wonderopolis® and the other resources that will have your kids enjoying science, math, reading and more.
The school year is soon coming to a close. Students will make their way to summer camps, family vacations, and nearby pools and parks. Before you face that room of empty desks, spend a few minutes thinking about the resource that worked best for you this year, make plans to reflect with students on all you’ve done during the year and encourage families to keep students learning during the summer months. Check out the calendar entries, lesson plans, and classroom activities below for this week and the approaching last weeks of the school year on the ReadWriteThink site. Have a great week!
May 16: The first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929. Students make lists of their favorite and least favorite movies and brainstorm qualities that make a film good or bad. Next, students write a movie review for a film they have seen. (For grades 5–12)
May 19: Malcolm X was born in Nebraska in 1925. Students write about the origin of their name and explore the names that Malcolm X used during this life. (For grades 5–12)
Look ahead to next week for lesson plans and activities on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the Brooklyn Bridge, astronaut Sally Ride, and authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scott O’Dell, and Rachel Carson.
The last days of 2011 are counting down, and it’s likely that your days in the classroom for 2011 are even fewer! As you’re planning for the last days of the calendar year, consider using ReadWriteThink interactives for one of these fun, winter activities: 
