1. Choose an animal you think about during the winter (like penguins, polar bears, or snowshoe rabbit), and explore its habits and life cycle with the Animal Inquiry interactive.
2. Use the Resume Generator to create a resume for a character from a favorite story or song. What would Scrooge list on his resume?
3. 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.
4. Have students map significant personal events they remember from previous winter holidays with the Graphic Map.
5. Write a class alphabet book of activities to try during the winter holidays with the Alphabet Organizer.
6. Ask students to think of a favorite event that happens during the winter break, and compose Acrostic Poems about it.
7. Create Character Trading Cards for characters from winter-themed or holiday-themed books or songs. Imagine a trading card for the Baby New Year!
8. Reflect on all that has happened since the start of the school year in a class newspaper, created with the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.
9. Explore school days and winter vacation in a Diamante Poem that unites the two opposing topics.
10. 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?

This list also posted in the Reading & Language Arts Group in the Thinkfinity Community.

Teachers on the Thinkfinity Community have been busy collecting answers. Theresa Gibbon suggests trying ReadWriteThink’s interactive Word Mover for “I Have a Dream” and Word Mover for Holes and asking students to rearrange the words on the whiteboard as a class experience. Find dozens of additional ideas on the Thinkfinity Community discussion board.

This post is the introduction from “August 10 to 16 on ReadWriteThink.” Read the rest of the post in the Thinkfinity Community site.

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?
• How did people involved respond to censorship?

Supplement your discussion with resources on censorship on the American Library Association website.

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.

[Photo: polaroid_banned books by karen horton, on Flickr]

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:

• Wordle: Word Maps for Fun and Analysis
• Wordle and the Inauguration
• Using Wordle Images to Hear What’s Said
• Text + Image = Tagxedo: The Next Generation of Word Cloud Fun

This post is the introduction from “July 11 to 16 on ReadWriteThink.” Read the rest of the post on Facebook.

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.

[Photo: Google Docs by BobChao, on Flickr]

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.

[Photo: Lemon Cake by Charles Haynes, on Flickr]

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!

New Resources

• New on ReadWriteThink:
  • Storyboarding the Transformation from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde (For grades 9–12)
  • Professional Writing in Action! Publishing Student Reviews Online (For grades 11–12)
  • Authoring an Epilogue That Helps Our Characters Live On (For grades 3–5)
• Take advantage of long summer days and prevent learning loss with Thinkfinity.org’s Summer Learning collection.
• Celebrate Flag Day with Thinkfinity.org lessons and activities.
• Tap the Parent & Afterschool Resources on ReadWriteThink for a range of activities for K–12 students (ages 4–18), including such activities as going on a reading hunt, exploring nature, directing summer blockbusters for favorite books, and blogging about career options.

From the Calendar

• 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)
• June 10: The Crystal Palace hosted the first display of life-size dinosaur replicas in 1854. After learning about Hawkins’ dinosaur replicas, students work individually or in small groups to investigate a dinosaur of their choice, comparing their findings to Hawkins’. (For grades 7–12)
• 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.

Connecting with Other Teachers

• As a teacher, how do you inspire students to learn more during the summer? Share your ideas on the Thinkfinity Community.
• Make the most of Thinkfinity.org by adding it to your social network!
• Add your thoughts to one of the Featured Topics on the Thinkfinity Community:
       What are some good lessons that teach about Internet safety?
       What do you find most rewarding about being an educator?
       How do you inspire your students to learn more over the summer?
• What resource rocked your classroom this year? Share a resource that most surprised you and sample a few that other teachers have shared.

If you have feedback or questions about ReadWriteThink, all you have to do is contact us.

[Photo: Red Slide by javcon117, on Flickr]

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:
  • Books about Bullying from Text Messages: Recommendations for Adolescent Readers
  • Take Me Out to the Ball Game from Chatting About Books: Recommendations for Young Readers
• 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:
  • Authentic Persuasive Writing to Promote Summer Reading (Grades 9–12)
  • Beyond “What I Did on Vacation”: Exploring the Genre of Travel Writing(Grades 9–12)
  • Book Clubs: Reading for Fun (Grades 3–5)
  • Reading Everywhere with Dr. Seuss (Grades K–2)
• Find more resources to kick off a summer of learning from our partners on Thinkfinity.

From the Calendar

• 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: National Spelling Bee Finals are held this week. Students discuss why certain contests get more publicity than others and what counts as “knowledge.” (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.

Connecting with Other Teachers

• As a teacher, how do you inspire students to learn more during the summer? Share your ideas on the Thinkfinity Community.
• Follow, friend, and connect with all the Thinkfinity partners with this collection of links to where to find us online.
• Add your thoughts to one of the Featured Topics on the Thinkfinity Community:
       What do you find most rewarding about being an educator?
       How do you motivate the unmotivated?
       How do you inspire your students to learn more over the summer?
• What resource rocked your classroom this year? Share a resource that most surprised you and sample a few that other teachers have shared.

If you have feedback or questions about ReadWriteThink, all you have to do is contact us.

[Photo: Bee by _PaulS_, on Flickr]

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.
• Make the most of summer. Use the Verizon Thinkfinity resources to kick off a summer of learning for students.

From the Calendar

• 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 26: Sally Ride, first American woman in space, was born in 1951. After exploring information about Sally Ride on the StarKids Who’s Who site, students write a letter using the Letter Generator to Dr. Ride. (For grades 3–8)
• 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.
• As a teacher, how do you inspire students to learn more during the summer? Share your ideas on the Thinkfinity Community.
• Follow, friend, and connect with all the Thinkfinity partners with this collection of links to where to find us online.
• The end of the school year is fast approaching. What do you do in the classroom to help students mark their accomplishments—and keep them focused on the work that remains?
• What resource rocked your classroom this year? Share a resource that most surprised you and sample a few that other teachers have shared.

If you have feedback or questions about ReadWriteThink, all you have to do is contact us.

[Photo: El Camion Mexicano, Soho, W1 by Ewan-M, on Flickr]

New Resources

• Create digital scrapbooks to reflect on the story year with the grades 6–8 lesson Making Memories: An End-of-Year Scrapbook.
• Celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage Month with lessons and activities from Thinkfinity.org.
• Explore lessons and activities about the Freedom Riders and challenge your students’ thinking about race relations in the 1960s vs. today.
• Make the most of summer. Use the Verizon Thinkfinity resources to kick off a summer of learning for students.

From the Calendar

• 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 18: Raymond Carver was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988. Students identify characteristics of Carver’s work and compare them to other authors, as well as to literary minimalism. Students then write original poems or short stories in minimalist style. (For grades 7–12)
• 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)
• May 20: Charles Lindbergh began his transatlantic flight in 1927. Students consider what is meant by the phrase “Human Hero,” think of people who fit into the category, and read a biography of a selected hero. (For grades 3–12)
• 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.

Connecting with Other Teachers

• As a teacher, how do you inspire students to learn more during the summer? Share your ideas on the Thinkfinity Community.
• Follow, friend, and connect with all the Thinkfinity partners with this collection of links to where to find us online.
• The end of the school year is fast approaching. What do you do in the classroom to help students mark their accomplishments—and keep them focused on the work that remains?
• What resource rocked your classroom this year? Share a resource that most surprised you and sample a few that other teachers have shared.

If you have feedback or questions about ReadWriteThink, all you have to do is contact us.

[Photo: More empty classroom stuff, UMBC by sidewalk flying, on Flickr]