The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 240,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 10 days for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
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Page 1 | How to Write about Africa | Granta 92: The View from Africa | Magazine | Granta Magazine
Analyzing Symbolism, Plot, and Theme in Death and the Miser – ReadWriteThink
apply analytical skills to an exploration of the early Renaissance painting Death and the Miser by Hieronymous Bosch
Renaissance Humanism in Hamlet and The Birth of Venus – ReadWriteThink
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Reap the rewards of letting your employees run free – Telegraph
Shakespeare: Iambic Pentameter, the Beat of the 16th Century – YouTube
Bedford Bits: Ideas for Teaching Composition » Blog Archive » Collaborative Visual Notetaking
Visual note-taking is the new religion | Made by Many
Dave Gray
TED Blog | Visual note-taking with Tom Wujec at TEDGlobal 2011
Beyond the Yellow Highlighter: Teaching Annotation to Improve Reading Comprehension
Your Brain’s Best Friend: The VISUAL NOTE-TAKING Online Course | Sunni Brown
TEDxWaterloo – Miriah Meyer – Information Visualization for Scientific Discovery – YouTube
Tom Wujec on 3 ways the brain creates meaning | Video on TED.com
Famous photo of female Pearl Harbor firefighters debunked | The Sideshow – Yahoo! News
Importance of checking sources!
Teenage Brains – Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine
Analyzing Symbolism, Plot, and Theme in Death and the Miser – ReadWriteThink
National Board Certification AYA_ELA_Portfolio_Instructions.pdf
Something I will be referring to A LOT
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Last Friday a colleague and I took some time for professional development at a high school in northern NJ that has a program similar to ours. I was very excited to meet Erin Colfax, co-author of the upcoming Writing Poetry through the Eyes of Science: A Teacher’s Guide to Scientific Literacy and Poetic Response. (We have already ordered a copy and I can’t wait to take a look at it!).
Erin was an absolute inspiration. The woman literally does everything. She designs research projects all over the world and travels to collect the necessary data so that she can bring it back to her students. On top of this, she is one of the leaders of the Science Academy program at Morristown HS and co-teaches in English and History. She and her co-teachers work together to integrate science and research into the content areas and the results are amazing. Erin told us how she studied with an embalmer in town during the Civil War unit and then they set up a mock embalming in the classroom, where the embalmer used Civil War era tools. How awesome is that?! And that is only one example of the amazing things she is doing.
Personally, I was thrilled to talk to Erin about English. I am a science geek and for a long time considered a career in science before I decided to be an English teacher. As my bio colleague (and my former bio teacher!) always reminds me, I am still pretty involved in science thanks to the Monarch Teacher Network. But Erin helped write Writing Poetry through the Eyes of Science: A Teacher’s Guide to Scientific Literacy and Poetic Response and I was dying to pick her brain before I got my hands on the book. Let me tell you- Erin and Nancy are both amazing! The way Erin described her Science and Poetry summer camp, it was like my dream come true. And the way they integrate science and poetry is inspirational. Erin believes that the act of writing poetry, designing similes, metaphors, and other figurative language, helps students really learn tough science concepts. You know what? I agree!
I am looking forward to talking more with Erin in the future and sharing ideas with her. I also highly recommend Writing Poetry through the Eyes of Science: A Teacher’s Guide to Scientific Literacy and Poetic Response. While it is only available for preorder now, it should ship at the end of this month. (And it will only cost about $30, NOT the crazy price listed on the Amazon preorder page!). I was lucky enough to see a lot of her materials last week and I know it will be well worth it.
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Cagle Post- Cartoons & Commentary
Great website full of political cartoons!
The-Essays-of-Arthur-Schopenhauer.docx
Great to use with Hamlet!
The Shakespeare industry — still booming after all these years
Great ideas for starting a Shakespeare unit!
Shakespeare: Brief and Naughty – YouTube
great video!
Great article to use w/ LoF
Philip Gerard: Excerpt from What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes
twice
Lauren McLaughlin & Scott Westerfeld Take the SAT | Figment Blog
Paris Review – Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke Butler
A 16 yr old writes to authors to question their use of symbolism in their works and receives answers from 75 of them.
An example of plagiarism in college.
Assessing Reflective Journal Writing – Questions for students
Great reflection questions for students. Would be interesting to use a few times per marking period.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Described as “Garden State meets Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”, Wintertown is a book I have been looking forward to reading. I am probably the world’s biggest “Garden State” fan, so it sounded perfect. Fortunately, I was not disappointed!
First, the structure of the book is unexpected. There are illustrations throughout the book, so upon first glance one might think it is a graphic novel. However, the prose is narrative. There are not a lot of illustrated YA novels out there and I think Wintertown will hit the sweet spot for many readers. I am not a big fan of comics, but I found myself drawn to the comics at the beginning of each chapter. In fact, I think I would read a graphic novel based on the comic strip!
Evan is preppy. He is Ivy-League bound, works hard at school, and wants to make his parents happy. His best friend Lucy moved away a few years ago, after her parents’ divorce, but Evan looks forward to her annual visit each winter. But this year, something is different. New Lucy arrives in town with short choppy dyed-solid-black hair. New Lucy suddenly has a nose piercing. Evan is shocked that she smokes and drinks now. Even worse? This New Lucy is always angry, quiet and moody. She no longer opens up to Evan and it’s like they aren’t even friends.
Evan is a good guy. He knows that the real Lucy, Old Lucy, is buried somewhere beneath this new facade. But after a few days he isn’t so sure. He doesn’t know how to be her friend even though he is pretty sure she needs a friend more than ever right now.
The POV changes from Evan to Lucy halfway through the book and you get to see Lucy’s point-of-view. While I did not particularly like Lucy, I appreciated the change. Seeing the events of the book through her eyes softened my feelings toward her a bit. She has had a hard life, one much harder than those around her realize. Being “tough” is her coping strategy. But she also wants to help Evan. She needs to convince him that he has to take control of his future instead of letting his father dictate his life’s path. But can she do that when she can’t even hold a real conversation with Evan?
This is a great coming of age story that will resonate with boys and girls. The comic strips and illustrations add another dimension to the story that is very much appreciated. The issues the characters experience are relatable and I think they will ring true for contemporary fans. I look forward to sharing this with my readers. Recommended for high school classroom libraries.
*ARC provided by the publisher
Filed under: reviews, YA | Tagged: contemporary YA, stephen emond, wintertown | 2 Comments »
Some of you may have noticed that the blog has been quieter than normal lately. I mean quieter than the normal “November silence because I have a million Cybils nominees to read and it’s the end of the marking period and NCTE and NaNoWriMo”. 🙂
The reason for the extra silence is that I am currently working on my National Board Certification. It was a last-minute decision this year because NJ is only offering partial funding until the end of 2011. Thus, I am working on portfolio entries! Is anyone else a National Board candidate this year?
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3quarksdaily: Reading Shakespeare helps doctors understand patients’ mental state
TEDTalks as of 11.13.11 – Google Docs
Spreadsheet listing TEDTalks
The Quick 10: 10 Ways Shakespeare Changed Everything – Mental Floss
Lesson Plan | Everyone’s a Critic: Analyzing Sitcoms as Cultural Texts – NYTimes.com
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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The Reading Zone 