The best thing about a day off, for any reason, is that you can focus all your attentions on the important work of sleeping all day long. Okay, so it’s a depressive thing to do, but sometimes avoiding everything that is grinding against you like sandpaper by sleeping all day is the only way.
Daily Work: Bleh
A rather boring day for readers. My back is all achey, so I’m taking tomorrow off to try to rest it before it gets any worse. Still working on the GIC blog, but the damned thing just won’t publish. I don’t understand how I can copy the settings exactly and fail to have it publish. Gave up on it a bit and did some moderating. I have notes on the book cover interactive to pass on, but I just wasn’t up to working on them. I’m supposed to be taking time off :)
ReadWriteThink: Three Lessons!
A content report was due today, so I made a last-minute push to get things online. Finished up the lesson I have been writing for several days now, and edited and posted two others:
- From Dr. Seuss to Jonathan Swift: Exploring the History behind the Satire
- After exploring the historical allusions behind Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book, the whole class discusses the history behind a passage from Gulliver’s Travels. After this group exploration, students research further historical allusions in Swift’s work and share their findings with the class. (This one I wrote)
- Alphabiography Project: Totally You
- Instead of writing their life stories in a linear fashion, students write their biographies from A to Z in this nontraditional autobiography activity, which was inspired by the book Totally Joe by James Howe. After the entry for each letter in their alphabiographies, students sum up the stories and vignettes by recording the life lessons they learned from the events.
- Finding Common Ground: Using Logical, Audience-Specific Arguments
- Using a hypothetical situation, students generate arguments from opposing points of view, discover areas of commonality through the use of Venn diagrams, and construct logical, audience-specific arguments in order to persuade their opponents. Students also have an opportunity to role-play with classmates in order to refine their arguments.
For Windows: HDClone Free Edition
HDClone Free Edition download and review – copy data to a larger hard drive from SnapFiles—another good thing to have around for future use. I haven’t tried it out, but it looks as though it could be a good tool.
Inbox: Celebrate Dr. Seuss and Read Across America Day!
Better known to most readers as Dr. Seuss, Dr. Theodor Geisel was born 102 years ago this week. The Ideas Section for this week’s Inbox is titled Celebrate Dr. Seuss and Read Across America Day!. The column includes lesson plans and ideas that focus on reading Dr. Seuss books in the classroom, including a lesson that uses The Cat in the Hat to discuss id, ego, and superego.
Musings: How To Make a Secret Hollow Book:
How To Make a Secret Hollow Book: – How To Do Stuff—I’m horribly entertained by the idea of creating one of these. The problem is that I’d want it to be a book that was in some way meaningful. A random book from a garage sale just won’t do. But I’m never going to be willing to cut up a book that I actually care about. Such difficulties. Beyond all that, I have no idea what I’d put in a hollow book. I just feel like I need one for some unknown reason.