Roofing people are crawling all over. There is a lot of heavy dropping of things up on the roof. The whole house rumbles. My own mini-earthquake. I’m expecting the windows to all be broken by the end of the day. I think this is all just the truck that’s putting all the shingles up there, but I have this fear of people falling through my roof. I’d call it an irrational fear, but well, they’ve already dropped things through the ceiling.

Today, blissfully unaware that my ceiling was falling in, I caught a wooly worm and brought him in the building. I was thinking of catching them when I was little. Probably 6 or 7.

Whenever I see wooly worms, I smile. When I came back with my exciting Chicken BLT Salad from Wendys, there by the building was this wooly worm. So on a whim, I picked him up and carried him inside. I figured I’d share him with Lisa, and then put him back outside.

But instead, Mr. Wooly Worm of Urbana got to take a trip to Philo to visit Lisa’s girls. The oldest is studying insects in school, so this wooly worm turned out to be a major prize. Of course, I now must worry that I have tainted the Philo Wooly Worm gene pool with the Urbana Wooly Worm strain. I do hope the resulting moths will not be overly mutated.

Of course, now I have my ceiling to worry about. The mutant Wooly Worm is nothing to freezing in my house because there’s a hole up to the attic. Not even a Wooly Worm can make it right.

When I left this morning, the roofing folks were up on the roof removing the shingles. They couldn’t start till today because of rain last week.

When I came home this evening, there was a hole in my ceiling.

Apparently they were working with the various vents, and one had an odd
elbow. They did whatever they did to remove shingles and lay new paper. In the process a huge pipe, bigger than my wrist, apparently dropped to the ceiling and broke through. It bounced. Didn’t actually come through and hit the floor. The pipe seems to be original, 1937.

Luckily I keep the back bedroom door closed and have a blanket shoved under it so that I don’t have to heat/cool it. That means that most of the plaster hit the blanket and not the hardwood floor. Unfortunately, now that I have a hole up to the attic, I’ve turned the heat completely off. It’s all going to escape up that hole anyway. Logic doesn’t keep me from freezing however, and I’m cold.

So now on top of the new roof and gutters, a plumber and a plaster guy have to be involved :( How I’m supposed to afford all this is beyond me. I’m feeling a mix of panicked anxiety, despair, and melancholia.

From ASCD’s SmartBrief:

“Parents curb children’s online time“ Many concerned parents are setting limits to ensure their children don’t go overboard in using cell phones, instant messaging and other digital media. A study this summer found that although teenagers’ computer time has soared over the past five years, more adolescents still prefer to socialize with each other in person than in cyberspace. The New York Times (free registration) (10/23)

What always ticks me off about these articles is the unchallenged assertion that the only social relationship that matters is a face-to-face relationship. When we look back at research on letter writing in the curriculum, no one suggests that pen pals are antisocial. GRRRR.

Recovered some old notes from a year ago that were originally intended for a TechNote. I never finished it, but thought that the ideas might still be useful to someone.

“JFK Reloaded Game Causes Controversy” by Jason Tuohey (PCWorld)
“Games that teach” by Betty Reid (Arizona Republic)
“Computer games help children learn, says study” by Polly Curtis (Guardian)
“Computer games ‘can help children learn’” by Lucy Ward (Guardian)

“Gamers Make Serious Work of Computer Games” by Renée Montagne (NPR)

“Problem-solving games on the rise” by Jose Antonio Vargas (Seattle Times/Washington Post)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002070534_seriousgames25.html

A number of pieces this week [ a year ago :) ] focus on the positive effects of video games on children. The pieces are full of places begging for discussion. Whether you accept the claims of the articles or not, these questions can lead to great classroom conversation:

• Ward’s article explains that video games can “help children learn concepts such as critical appreciation of narrative structure or character development which they might otherwise study in a novel.” Choose a video game you’re familiar with and sketch out the narrative structure and the ways that the characters develop over the course of the game. Based on your experience with novels, how do the literary elements in the video game compare?

Edited and posted another elementary lesson plan. This one is K-2 and was written by one of NCTE’s book authors. It’s tied to Chapter One of Joy Moss’s Literature, Literacy, and Comprehension Strategies in the Elementary School. The lesson, Comparing Fiction and Nonfiction with Little Red Riding Hood Text Sets, has students explore different versions of tale and facts and fiction about wolves.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink

Friday is apparently odds and ends day this week:

• I added the Gettysburg lessons to the Gettysburg Address calendar entry.
• Then there was the fun of cleaning up the broken links on the site. A new broken links report comes out on Monday, so I needed to get the old ones taken care of. I was disappointed to find that tooter4kids moved things all around, breaking all the links—mainly because that meant I had to find the new locations and fix them all. It’s not exactly my kind of site. There’s a little too much wallpaper for my tastes :)
• Got further ahead on Ideas columns by doing the draft for November 1, which will be on Native American Heritage Month.
• I tried to tidy up the office as well. My desk was piled high. It still is in places, but it’s a bit less horrible.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink

This morning at work, I finished editing a 3-5 lesson plan that uses an Avi book, Alter Egos and More with Avi’s “Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?”. The abstract explains, “Today’s elementary students bring many experiences with a variety of texts to the classroom: print, music, online literacies, technical reading and writing, and so on. This lesson plan uses students’ knowledge of these new literacies to introduce them to similar literacies of the past.” Basically, the Avi book is told in radio scripts; so students explore the scripts in the book and authentic scripts online. Then they write scripts of their own, similar to thoses written by the protagonist in the novel.

After the excitement of physical therapy, I spent the evening editing another 3-5 lesson. Lisa took the leftovers from my 9-12 lesson, and wrote Engaging Students in a Collaborative Exploration of the Gettysburg Address. Her abstract explains, “Working collaboratively, students learn more about the Civil War through the Gettysburg Address. Teams of students explore multiple resources and actively engage in learning more about this historical document, using words from the Gettysburg Address as their inspiration.”

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink

Today has been totally mixed up. It was pouring rain this morning, so no dumpster in the driveway and no work on a new roof that I can’t afford in the first place. Will it be tomorrow? Saturday? Monday? Who knows when the work will begin.

The physical therapy was a complete waste of time. Turns out that I should have canceled the appointment. So hours, days, of worrying and crying, and when I tell him I have no pain, he says, “oh, I’m sorry. Did you have to take off work to be here? That’s too bad.”

Now because I was there, and he needed something to do, I suffered through an “educational session.” He went in search of the fake spine so that he could show me what bones and disks look like and tell me how they work. Then we discussed sitting up straight, having a good chair at work, walking a lot, and other back care tips. And when I was released I did my grocery shopping for the week. I didn’t need to go back to work, so I figured I might as well accomplish something. I found however that lots of kids and parents are wondering about the grocery store in the after-school, before-dinner hours. Another educational moment.

Several of the ideas on Micro Persuasion: Ten RSS Hacks, which I found via in someone else’s blog (and I can’t remember whose), seemed interesting. gada.be sounds useful, if I can ever figure out what I need to search for in the first place.