Inbox: Exploring Gender in Fairy Tales

January 5, 2006 by

The Ideas section from this week’s Inbox was titled, “Exploring Gender in Fairy Tales.” The column includes 3 lesson plans and 4 articles.

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December 13, 2005 by

The Ideas section for today’s Inbox focused on Supporting and Exploring Diversity. The articles and lesson plans discuss ways to talk about family histories and culture. The pieces could be done at the holidays—or any time.

Finished up Onomatopoeia: A Figurative Language Mini-lesson. It’s really quite standard exploration, using Poe’s “The Bells.” It’s another of the mini-lessons that the Advisory Board called for.


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December 6, 2005 by

The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox tied to Resolution on Supporting School and Community Libraries, passed at the Annual Convention in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago. The collection of lesson plans and articles focuses on Building an Independent Reading Program.

The call with the MarcoPolo folks didn’t really reveal a good solution for the title bars, so we’re just letting the <i> codes show up. On a positive note, however, I finally duplicated the calendar error. He was using straight quotes in his text. When the page posted to the database, the field was truncating at the quotes in his text, and the stuff after the quotation mark in the text just confused everything. I have instructed him to use curly quotes from now on. At least it was a simple solution.


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Honesty and Clarity in Advertising and the Media (Inbox Ideas)

November 29, 2005 by

The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox celebrates the winner of the 2005 NCTE Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language: The Daily Show :)

How could I NOT take advantage of the opportunity to talk about The Daily Show officially? The official title of the column is “Honesty and Clarity in Advertising and the Media,” and it includes 4 articles and a ReadWriteThink lesson plan link.

Spent time today working on the design for the Book Cover interactive. After pulling dozens of books off the shelves in the office, we finally sketched out the templates for the various parts of the cover (front, flaps, back, spine). We’re thinking it will launch in January.


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Best Books (Inbox Ideas)

November 22, 2005 by

The Ideas Section for this week’s Inbox focused on Best Books, pointing to award winners that have been recently announced at NCTE’s Annual Convention and books that have been recently reviewed in NCTE publications.


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The Gettysburg Address (Inbox Ideas)

November 15, 2005 by

The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox focuses on The Gettysburg Address. Okay, I know. It probably seems like a stretch to some of you, but in actuality, it worked out fairly well. The entry includes some information on primary and secondary sources as well as some resources on Gettysburg-era Doublespeak.

And speaking of Doublespeak, I found out today who is receiving the Doublespeak Award at Annual Convention later this week. It’s such a badge of honor for this recipient. Really. It’s not a negative thing at all for them. I’m so tickled :)

I spent much of the day noticing that it was pouring rain (not pouring, pounding), working on last-minute details for Convention, and, this evening, working on the War of the Worlds lesson plan. I need to get it online tomorrow for the content report.

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Writing Process Strategies (Inbox Ideas)

November 8, 2005 by

The Ideas section for today’s Inbox focused on modeling and exploring writing process strategies. It’s full of lesson plans for K-12, and a couple of articles for college.

I also finished editing and published Susan Spangler’s lesson on pop culture. You’re the Top! Pop Culture Then and Now asks students to explore present-day pop culture by updating Cole Porter’s song “You’re the Top!” to use modern references. One great lesson from IATE! Willie Bobbie, are you jealous yet?


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Native American Heritage (Inbox Ideas)

November 1, 2005 by

The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox focuses on Native American Heritage, in celebration of Native American Heritage Month. The section links to the related ReadWriteThink calendar entry, which includes several relevant lesson plans.

The first of the month also means it’s time for a content report. Between last night and today, I edited and posted two more lessons. Designing Museum Exhibits for The Grapes of Wrath: A Multigenre Project is a 9-12 lesson plan that asks students to create six artifacts in a variety of genres that demonstrate their understanding of a related research topic and its significance.

The second lesson, Choosing One Word: Summarizing Shel Silverstein’s “Sick,” explores comprehension by asking K-2 students to pick one word that represents a reading. In this case it’s the Silverstein poem, but the activity could be completed with any text.


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October 25, 2005 by

The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox focuses on Spooky Resources for Halloween and Dias de los Muertos. The piece includes several lesson plans and two journal articles.


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October 19, 2005 by

The Ideas column for this week’s Inbox focuses on pieces that tie to speakers who will be at NCTE’s Annual Convention in Pittsburgh.

Spent today setting up the new ReadWriteThink calendar entries for FY06. In the past, we’ve gone month by month, adding new entries each month as seemed appropriate. Now that we have gone through that process twice, we have a solid number of entries for each month. For this fiscal year’s grant, we looked over the entire calendar. Some weeks ago, I added all of the entries to a wall calendar so that we could see any overall gaps in the greater scheme of things (e.g., weeks without enough entries).

We also looked for gaps in coverage on the whole site. For instance, what authors or kinds of writing did people expect a language arts site to include that were not yet covered adequately in the lessons and/or calendar. We have 30 entries to add over the course of three phases. The new pieces will include authors such as Alice Walker, Amy Tan, and Walt Whitman (as well as some picture book authors and important events).

To set up these entries, I added them all to the calendar, but not marked live of course. I had to hack some ASP to create running lists of the three phases, which took most of the afternoon. Odd how something that takes 5 seconds to say takes 5 hours to do. I ended up having to do a supremely silly nested if-then that handcoded the dates. There’s no field in the database that I can use to indicate they’re in one of these phases, and I’m too much of a scaredy pants to add a field to the table. One day, I really need to figure out how to play around with SQL, but I’m so afraid to do anything when the only working database I have access to is the site’s database. But back the to point, the new entries are under development and should be 1/3 published by the end of the year, and the rest over the course of several months next year.

I guess that I left out that I took numerous breaks to put up those new Halloween decorations. I should get a picture. It’s intriguing because we never managed to get the ladder to take down the snowflakes from last Christmas. That means we have ghosts, pumpkins, bats, spiders… and snowflakes hanging from the ceiling now. I need to dig under the desk and figure out what other pumpkinish things I have to pull out.


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