My Best Ideas Are Stolen Ones 06/05/2009
When I go to an educational conference, I'm a sucker for sessions that deal with fast-and-dirty, nuts-and-bolts tricks and techniques that I can use in the classroom. Discussions of Educational Philosophy are obviously important and sessions that focus on policy and The Big Picture certainly have their place, but the sessions that I've gotten the most lasting impact from have usually been ones where some veteran teacher has shared a really cool trick that I can adapt and use right away. This past Spring, at the NELMS Annual Conference, I sat in on a session given by that morning's keynote speaker. She seemed funny and approachable and really, really smart - in other words, a good teacher - so I decided to risk some depth and meaning. As it turns out, she was really good and made a lot of really good points, but what really got my attention was an example she gave of a project that she and a Health teacher had come up with for a 6th grade class. They were studying the circulatory system and as they wrapped up the unit, they had the students make t-shirts with the circulatory system drawn on it. Then on a given day, all the students wore their t-shirts and any adult in the building could stop them, point to something on their shirt and say, "Hey - what does that do?" As soon I heard about this, a lightbulb went off in my head. [Just a quick language question - why do we say a lightbulb went off IN our heads, when we mean OVER them, like in a cartoon? And, for that matter, why do we say they went OFF, when we mean ON? But I digress...] Our 8th graders are proud of the amount they learn in their New York City project and would like to be able to show it off. This t-shirt idea seemed like a fun way for them to do that. As soon as the session was over, I cornered Mrs. Faber and asked if she could spare me a moment to give me advice about how best to rip off her idea. She was incredibly gracious and within a minute or two came up with some fantastic guidelines:
So far, it's been awesome. Here's how it worked:  For the t-shirts themselves, I picked up some pocket-less men's undershirts from Walmart. I got mostly Large, with a few Medium and a few more Extra Large undershirts. I tried to mostly grab the packages with a bonus t-shirt in it. 57 t-shirts ran me about $96. [I considered having each student bring in $2 to pay for their own shirts, but I knew what an exercise in frustration that would be, so I asked around and was able to find enough money in an account at school to re-imburse me.] Because these t-shirts are only going to be worn for one day, I didn't go out of my way to get thick, high quality, durable shirts. For that matter, we didn't use long-lasting, color-fast dyes or ink to write on them; we used magic markers.  One thing I did ask students to bring in was empty cereal boxes. In my mind, I saw students writing on these thin, white t-shirts with black magic markers and the ink bleeding through to the other side of the shirt. By putting a thin piece of cardboard - like a cereal box - inside the shirt while they draw, students could keep their work neater. As it turns out, the students who are usually the least enthusiastic about getting homework turned in are the most enthusiastic about getting a homework grade for bringing in a cereal box.  Another really cool use for an empty cereal box: Tape it to the wall, use your projector to shine a map onto it, trace and cut out the map and you've got a really good stencil of Manhattan for the back of the shirt.  For four classes of up to twenty students, I cut out about a dozen stencils. This turned out to be just about right. I made sure to mark the stencils to indicate which side goes up. It would be a pity to have them show off all their knowledge of Manhattan with the map backwards.  Before any student was given a t-shirt they had to fill out a worksheet showing what they were going to put on it. This was to prevent the inevitable, "Mr. Fladd, I messed up; I need another t-shirt!" Another bonus is that it let me pre-emptively check their spelling. 
 The students were great at figuring out the best way to write on their t-shirts. Within a matter of minutes, they discovered that it was easier to write on the fabric if the t-shirt was stretched tight (with the cereal box inside). The best way to do this was by taping it to a table or the floor with masking tape.  Most of the students ended up working in pairs - at least for the mapping part of the job. It takes two hands to hold the stencil flat and firm against the t-shirt. They discovered that the best marker to use for this part of the project was a standard Sharpie. Short strokes made smoother lines than long ones, which tended to pull the fabric into wrinkles.  Some of the students felt more comfortable working on the floor.  Once students had gotten their basic information down, they were allowed to decorate their shirts however they wanted. [This girl had researched the 19th Century Irish streetgang, the Dead Rabits.]  The end results were pretty satisfying. The students were engaged. They demonstrated authentic learning and they had fun.  Mind you - at this point, we haven't actually gone through the question-answering process. I'll update you on how that goes next week. Update (several days later): Well, we've been through the question-answering process and it seems promising. The students were very motivated for most of the day and were really eager to pigeonhole adults and share information about their projects. Things got a little bit rocky at the end of the day, but with a few tweaks, the process should go much smoother next year. Glitch #1 - Not Enough Adults To Go Around Tucked away in our own corner of the school, the 8th graders did not get a chance to really show off their knowledge to new adults unfamiliar with their work. Next year, we should have some sort of reception and invite adults to come look at their projects and do the t-shirt questioning process then, as well as throughout the day. Glitch #2 - A Few Students Gaming the System A few of our students got together and pooled their tickets in an explicit attempt to "keep the smart kids from winning". This took a bit of the air out of the second half of the day. We should have anticipated this, but somehow, it slipped under our radar. (To be fair, I had never said that they couldn't do this.) A few of the students gave up at that point, realizing that they couldn't accumalate enough tickets to compete with The Pool. Next year, even though it will mean more work for the adults, when an adult awards a ticket, we'll have them write the kid's name on the back of it in ink and initial it. Also, we'll award the grand prize based on the number of tickets, but then put all the other tickets into a hat and draw two other winners to keep students motivated. Glitch #3 - Spoiler Somehow, one of our students found out what the grand prize was and made sure that all the other students knew within a matter of minutes. This made the end of the day extremely anticlimactic and many of the students came out of the project feeling very dejected. I guess the only way to prevent that next year is to use air-tight security. Overall Assessment of the T-Shirt Project: Almost every new project or activity has rough spots the first time through. I think that this t-shirt activity has a lot of promise. We'll try it again next year and see how it goes. Project Idea Grade - A Minus Project Execution Grade - B Minus  Every year, our 8th graders go to New York City for their Class Trip. It's a pretty big deal. Some of these kids have never been out of New England. A few years ago, the teachers and advisors on the trip were tearing their hair out at the jaded attitude of our students. Our guys got off the bus, looked around for a moment or two, then said something like, "Huh! Big buildings. When do we go shopping?" I don't think the phrase "Aaaaaaaargh!!!!" quite covers this situation. After we got back from the trip that year, the staff did some brainstorming about our too-cool-for-Manhattan students and what we came up with was this: Why the heck SHOULD they be impressed? What did they know about New York - its history, culture, art, food, etc..? Was it reasonable to expect them to be impressed by something they had no frame of reference to understand? So every year since then, my 8th grade team has finished up the school year with a big, over-the-top multi-disciplinary unit on the History, Geography, Poetry and Math of New York City. In Social Studies, I devote several weeks to teaching our 8th graders the geography and history of the city. (What is a borough? What is the difference between Manhattan and New York City? What's the big deal about the Brookyln Bridge - I mean, it's just a BRIDGE, after all...? What really happened on 9-11?) This gives me a useful platform to spiral all the concepts we've been learning about all year long - the Constitution, Electoral Politics, Transportation, Immigration, African-American History and Geography. My collegues in Math and Literacy do similarly intensive things in their disciplines. The difference in student attitudes has been nothing short of astounding. Our guys get off the bus jumping out of their skin with excitement about seeing all the things they've been learning about. They will lecture anyone who stands still long enough about the history of what we are seeing. A couple of years ago, our students told our tour guide so much about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Manhattan schist that he was under the impression that we were from some private school for geniuses up in the hills of New Hampshire. (We're not.) To finish off the New York City unit before we leave, each student has to complete a New York City project. He or she picks a topic from a long list and becomes an expert on that topic - everything from The History of Central Park to The Best Places to Find Junkfood in Manhattan to Are There Really Alligators in the Sewers?  This bulletin board is one way our students display their knowledge. Each of them uses GoogleMaps Streetview or Google Earth to find a street-level or an aerial view of one of the places they have studied in the course of researching his or her project. Each of them does a screen capture of the view on Google, imports it into a graphics program, resizes it, and saves it to a file for printing. When they get the hard copy of their picture, they write a quick identifying sentence/explanation of the picture, then post it on our bulletin board, which has a map of Manhattan traced on it.  They connect their pictures to the Manhattan map with colored yarn to show where their place is located. This is an incredibly weird synthesis of high and low tech, but this bulletin board makes a striking visual statement in our hallway. When the material is presented this way, it becomes sort of impressive how much our guys have learned about the topic collectively. A Fun, Silly Toy 05/31/2009
 I'm not sure exactly how to use this in the classroom, but this application is a LOT of fun! The Towel of Cords 05/21/2009
 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels... "A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with." Consider this cord the Towel of electronics cables. You can use it to:
This beautiful, nameless cord has never let me down. Praise Be to Cord. Ultra Low-Tech Message Board 05/16/2009
 Each day, the Art teachers in my school leave easels outside of their rooms with instructions to let their students know what is expected of them once they get into the classroom. A typical message might read: "It's Amazing Monday! Super artists, meet quietly on the rug, so we can continue our discussion of Post-Cubist lithographers" (Or something like that.) Anyway, it it only took me eight years to realize that this would be a very useful tool in the 8th Grade. About seventy-two times each day, I have students ask me what blocks they need to go to and what they will need when they get there. About two months ago, I posted this mini-whiteboard on the door to my classroom with all that information. Has it solved the whole "Mr.FladdwhatblockisitandwhatdoIneedtobring?" problem? No. Has it helped? Yes.  I found an old mini-whiteboard in my MightBeUsefulSomeday cupboard. I glued two magnetic strips onto the back with a hot-glue gun, which worked reasonably well. The only problem was that I can't glue fast enough to coat the whole strip at once before some of the glue cools too much to attach firmly. After a week or two, the strips started to pull away from the back of the board. I solved this problem with our old friend, KrazyGlue. It's not pretty, but it works. (The runny, nasty, ugly glue blotches face the door anyway.) The magnetic strips hold the messageboard onto my steel door. (I learned pretty quickly that I need to hang it pretty high up. Students in my Homeroom like to lean agains the door and they kept rubbing the message off the board.) Looking At the Roots Project Through Wordle 04/20/2009
[Note - I have removed the links to the RootsBlog in this post. I'm in the process of setting up the blog for a new school year and I've erased last year's student posts. I've also temporarily removed the synopses of the episodes on the RootsBlog pages, so that students will be surprised when they see the movies in class. Sorry for any inconvenience.]  My classes' last activity before leaving on Spring Break this past week was watching the final episode of Roots.  Episode One:  Episode Two:  Episode Three:  Episode Four:  Episode Five: Episode Six:  Several months ago, I posted a blog about Roz Savage, an extreme athlete in the process of rowing solo across the Pacific Ocean, the first woman to do so. She finished the first leg of her trip - from San Francisco to Hawaii in January. She's currently gearing up to start the second leg - from Hawaii to Tuvalu at the end of May. This Year's Immigration Political Cartoons 04/14/2009
Last year, I put together movies of the political cartoons that my students had drawn as part of our Immigration Unit. This year's class is just finishing up that same unit. World War One In Plain English 04/11/2009
When I first started teaching, I was hampered by my pride in my own creativity. I felt like everything I came up with for my students should be new and original and sparkling with impressiveness. PowerPoint Trick #9 - Creating Worksheets 03/30/2009
  Start a new PowerPoint presentation.  Choose the page from the page menu on the left side of your screen and copy it several times. You can also use the "Insert Duplicate Slide" command to do this. | AuthorMr. Fladd is a recognized authority in... er... um... something. CategoriesAll | ||
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