artist:  Gavin Aung Than
zenpencils.com

The genius behind Zen Pencils is Gavin Aung Than.  Zen Pencils is a “a cartoon blog which adapts inspirational quotes into comic stories.”  I admire Than’s talent immensely, and I was so thrilled when I discovered his site.  Like many people, I collect inspiring quotes, and when Than’s graphics accompany them, they are true art.

You can get your own set of three free, high quality posters from Zen Pencils by signing up for updates here.  They feature quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I think they are perfect for the classroom.  If you go to Than’s blog, he even gives you tips for framing his posters.  More prints are available, of course, from the Zen Pencils store.  One of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein is featured above, and can be found in the store.

I also like the Downloads page.  My plan for next year is to download the wallpapers to the desktop computers in my classroom – maybe even the iPads – so when they are not being used there will still be some inspiring graphics on their screens!

Last week,in my post about my intention to use more online learning with my students, I mentioned a pilot summer camp my district is doing with Edmodo. You may not have access to something like this, but if you are interested in offering something similar to your own students or children this summer, you might want to point them to Camp What-A-Wonder.

Camp What-A-Wonder is being offered by Wonderopolis from today (Monday, June 17th) through Friday, July 26th. You can sign up for updates here, or you can just visit the site each day to enjoy the new resources being offered for each week’s theme. This weeks’ theme: “Ant Farms, Spider Webs and Underwater Coves.”

You will receive a “Wonder” prompt, a suggested Family Activity, Recommended Reading, and Related Wonder article links – which often include videos and even more suggested activities.

If you want to do some virtual exploration without all of the headaches of packing and spraying on bug spray, then Camp What-A-Wonder might be just the right place for you!  The kids can even send postcards to keep you updated on their adventures!

I need to encourage more doodling in my class – maybe even model it more for my students.  I’m not talking about the distracted kind of eyes-staring-out-the-window-while-you-scribble type of doodling.  I’m talking about doodling with purpose and panache.  The Vi Hart kind of doodling:

Sunni Brown can give tell you all of the myths about doodling in a fun, doodly way:

For more examples of doodling, you can see “10 Brilliant Examples of Sketch Notes: Notetaking for the 21st Century.”

Below, you can see one of the 10 pieces, based on Seth Grodin’s talk, “Stop Stealing Dreams.” (I had to look up “one-buttock playing”, which I assure you is completely appropriate in context!)

from supertintin.com

For many of us, at least in the United States, another school year is over.  Even as we eagerly embark on our rejuvenation journeys for the summer, you might be thinking, as I am, of new ideas for the next school year.  This week, I would like to share some of the improvements I hope to make in my classroom for the 2013-2014 school year.  Today’s post is about using Skype in the classroom.

I say that I am going to do it every year, and I never do.  I tried it once a few years ago, and it was a bit of a disaster – completely disorganized, kids who were bored watching other kids doing it, kids who were doing it with nothing to day.

But then I ran across this Mystery Skype article that I posted about in April, and I saw how it could be something manageable – and a highly engaging learning experience for my students.

I love that the site deals with the logistics, like assigned roles for the students, and possible questions.  I really could have used both of those things during our first experience!

I definitely plan to try this with my first graders next year.  Our theme is “Folktales” and we read stories from around the world.  At that age, even gifted first graders are still trying to figure out the differences between cities, countries, and continents – and they are absolutely fascinated with looking up locations on the globe and on Google Earth.

I also found Skype in the Classroom, which gives even more resources.

I’m trying to think of other ways to use Skype besides the typical ones (interviewing an author or  learning about an international classroom).  One way that I am considering is to bring it in to our Systems Thinking unit by having the students from different countries respond to a global issue and the way they see it effecting them.  Along the same lines, they could discuss their reactions to an event in history.  It might be fun to take some common idioms from different cultures and have the students complete or interpret them.  I’d also like to get some people to speak to my students about their passions, and Skype could open this up to more than local leaders.

Here are some more Skype resources in case you are interested.  However, I would love to hear any ideas you may have that are NOT on this list!

from www.tynker.com

For many of us, at least in the United States, another school year is over.  Even as we eagerly embark on our rejuvenation journeys for the summer, you might be thinking, as I am, of new ideas for the next school year.  This week, I would like to share some of the improvements I hope to make in my classroom for the 2013-2014 school year.  Today’s post is about the benefits of teaching programming to our students.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have probably noticed that I am a huge advocate for teaching programming to kids.  You can see this trend building in a lot of the education blogs and professional publications.  Like all trends, it needs to be done right so that it will not be a colossal failure or a “flash in the pan.” Here is why it should be done, and how I plan on doing it next year in my classroom.

Why We Should Teach Programming to Kids

I think that there is a misconception that this is all about teaching kids a new “language” that is useful in the career market. While that is, perhaps, one of the benefits, I think that it should not be the main purpose.  Programming languages evolve quickly, and teaching a specific one might be likened to teaching Latin.  It can help you to decode other languages, but it is unlikely you will use it daily.

I learned Basic when I was in high school.  I haven’t used it since.  But I still remember some very important lessons that I learned in that class that can be extrapolated for real life.

The most important lesson was that, if you are not getting the results you want, you can’t keep doing the same thing.  I remember the first couple of times a program did not work the way I wanted it to, and I kept saying to the computer, “That’s not what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Once I realized that I only had myself to blame, I would set about finding out what I had done wrong.  This led to the next life lesson – find the real source of the problem or your “fix” will make things worse.  Sometimes I had to dig deep into the code to figure it out, but would not realize that until I had tried one or two simple revisions that would end in disaster.

When programming, you also advance through the Scientific Process, and learn to change one variable at a time if your conclusion is not what you expected.

And finally, programming is not all about logic.  Once you understand the code, you can use your imagination to create unusual, unique, and even beautiful programs.

What I Plan to Do Next Year

As some of my colleagues pointed out this year, Programming falls very easily into something that we already have in our curriculum for elementary gifted students – Systems Thinking.  Now that I am becoming familiar with Tynker through the online summer class I’m offering, I plan to use Tynker with my 3rd graders during our Systems Thinking unit.  If you want to start anywhere with programming (from about 7 or 8 years old and up), I would highly recommend Tynker as you can create classes and monitor student progress very easily.  Plus, it has an engaging curriculum of projects.

I want to weave programming throughout my K-5 gifted classes, so I will begin my Kinders with the iPad app Daisy the Dinosaur. For 1st, we will move on to Kodable, and for second, Hopscotch.  (I may switch these last 2 around – I need to play with them more to determine difficulty levels.)

3rd grade, as I mentioned, will do Tynker.  4th grade will work on Cargo-Bot.  And, 5th grade will work with Gamestar Mechanic (which is web-based).

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment.  Also, for even more links for Programming for Kids, feel free to visit my Pinterest board on this topic.

sample pages from our course catalog, which can be found here

For many of us, at least in the United States, another school year is over.  Even as we eagerly embark on our rejuvenation journeys for the summer, you might be thinking, as I am, of new ideas for the next school year.  This week, I would like to share some of the improvements I hope to make in my classroom for the 2013-2014 school year.  Today’s post is about offering more opportunities to my students using online tools.

I am so excited about a pilot project that we are doing in my school district this year.  A group of us (elementary gifted and talented teachers) got together, and decided to offer some online classes to our students for the summer.  The classes are FREE, and anyone in our 3rd-5th gifted classes throughout our district was allowed to sign up for one.  We had 320 students sign up for this first summer.  We would have had more if we had not cut off the registration date or if we had opened it up to more grade levels.  This tells me that there is a thirst for knowledge that motivates our students to learn even when they are not in school.

You can visit a sample of our course catalog here.  I removed the links and the teacher names to ensure privacy, but I want to give a huge shout-out to all of the teachers involved, as they are doing this on a completely voluntary basis during their summer.

We are using Edmodo as the vehicle for delivering our courses, and I am just in the process of realizing the potential of this web application (also available as an app).  As I mentioned in yesterday’s Genius Hour post, there are so many students out there who want to learn more than what is being offered in their regular classrooms.  Edmodo gives us the opportunity to give them more options, allowing us to schedule assignments and posts that they can access on their own time.  There are certainly other online class sites out there, but this is what our district happens to be using at the moment, and it serves our purposes very well.

Thrilled as I am about our summer program, I would like to see it expand.  I would also like to implement a similar program throughout the school year.  So, my goal for this following school year is to try offering some courses for my own students that can be done on their own time – or, if a classroom teacher agrees, in place of work that they have already mastered in the regular classroom.

Please understand that I am not envisioning these courses to be MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Course), or to replace the physical teaching environment.  I want to keep the courses small and personalized.  I want the courses to enhance what my students are already learning, and to fuel their desire for finding out more on topics that interest them.

I plan to write a reflection about our summer experience in a couple of months (most of the classes began yesterday), after I get feedback from the students and teachers.  In the meantime, if you think you might like to try something like this, feel free to contact me at teichh@neisd.net if you have any questions.

click here to view the live (sample) catalog on Flipsnack

from thinkgeek.com

For many of us, at least in the United States, another school year is over.  Even as we eagerly embark on our rejuvenation journeys for the summer, you might be thinking, as I am, of new ideas for the next school year.  This week, I would like to share some of the improvements I hope to make in my classroom for the 2013-2014 school year.  Today’s post is about Genius Hour.  You can find more Genius Hour Resources here.

I have been working on Genius Hour with my 5th grade gifted classes for two years now.  I definitely want to continue this, but, as always, I saw some areas that needed tweaking.  First, though, I wanted to clarify my purpose for Genius Hour.

Genius Hour Purpose:  To give my students the opportunity to indulge their curiosity on a variety of topics not included in the regular curriculum while learning best practices for researching, presenting, and extending their thinking.  

With that goal in mind, I intend to make the following changes to Genius Hour next year:

• offer it to my 3rd and 4th graders (with gradual scaffolding of activities that will lead to independence)
• require portions of Kaplan’s Depth and Complexity to be included in final products
• place more emphasis on the art of presentation
• scatter more lessons on research skills throughout the year

Here are some problems that I encountered last year for which I have tentative solutions:

• difficulty selecting topics – students are so used to being told what they must research that telling them that they can study “anything you want” paralyzes some of them.  We will begin the year with brainstorming, and they will have a hot list of sites with tantalizing projects to choose from (you can find this list on my Genius Hour page).  I am also going to create a catalog of student “experts” in the class, and topics that they could possibly “teach” their classmates.  (One 5th grader taught another one HTML last year.  He wanted to know, and she was happy to teach him!)
• unoriginal presentations – students often stuck with the safety of Powerpoint for presentations even though I offered alternatives.  I need to model other options.
• rushing through the planning sheet -  I am going to “re-vamp” the planning sheet to look more engaging, and to ask different questions.  I might even have different forms for planning sheets throughout the year.  I think it’s important to plan, but my students got tired of answering the same thing for each project.
• rushing through the reflection – Same issue and same solution.
• chaos at the beginning of each hour - I will be assigning students to be in charge of technology and materials distribution so I can help students get started immediately instead of fielding questions while I am trying to pass out laptops, iPads, and planning sheets.

Just to be clear, Genius Hour was a huge success in my classroom, despite the problems listed above.  Here are the positive results that I saw:

• students collaborating more, and with different people - For example, the pair that worked on HTML code would never have worked willingly as partners for a regular classroom activity.
• absolute engagement during seeming chaos – Out of 16 students, only 1 was consistently off-task each time.  I was never able to discover what could motivate him enough to concentrate on it for the entire hour.  The rest, however, were always engaged because they had gotten to choose what they wanted to do.
• learning how to learn – How do you find out something about an obscure topic?  How do you determine what sites are reliable?  How can you get help when no one in your class, including your teacher, has ever tried this before?  These are life skills that my students will carry with them from Genius Hour.
• problem solving – What do you do if the outcome isn’t what you expected (like my poor student who was determined to make a rubber-band powered car, and spent the entire year trying to make it work)?  What do you do if you lose your entire presentation because you saved it the wrong way?  How do you transfer your wonderful iPad video to a PC?
• perseverance – Again, my student with the rubber-band powered car, and so many other students who encountered stumbling blocks, soldiered on, and never gave up.
• appreciation from parents and students - This one took me by surprise.  I suspected the students would be thrilled to be given this freedom, but I received many notes and e-mails from parents who were happy to see their children so excited about school and learning.

I would love any suggestions from those of you who have been implementing Genius Hour in your classrooms.  And, if you are new to this idea, or just would like more resources, please visit my Genius Hour page to learn more about what you can do that has the potential to have the most impact on your students out of your entire curriculum.

from:  http://www.babble.com

This week, I am focusing on providing resources to “Squash the Summer Slide” as ReadWriteThink puts it. Parents often ask me at this time of year for ideas to keep students challenged over the summer.  Here are links to the rest of the articles from this week:

Summer Superheroes

Summer Enrichment Flyer

Summer Art

National Geographic Families

Since today is also Fun Friday, I thought pool noodle projects would be appropriate!  After coming across one article on ways to use pool noodles, I did an internet search, and found a lot more creative ideas than I dreamed could exist for using these long pieces of foam!

My students use every spare moment they can get in my classroom to build elaborate marble runs, so the above picture caught my eye immediately.  You can find it, along with 19 other ideas for pool noodles here.

You can find the idea for pool noodle flash cards here.  To kick it up a notch for gifted thinkers, why not call out a word in a foreign language, or a definition, and have them find the noodle pieces that spell its counterpart?

Along with the Pool Noodle Super Sprinkler, you can find 29 other ideas here.

Of course, with all of these innovative suggestions I did not find any that matched the one drawn by one of my students!

from my Summer Pool Party packet

from “Family Treasure Hunting”

This week, I am focusing on providing resources to “Squash the Summer Slide” as ReadWriteThink puts it. Parents often ask me at this time of year for ideas to keep students challenged over the summer.  National Geographic Families has some links that might be of particular interest during the next three months.

Try out the geography games from National Geographic here

Geographic Groceries puts a new twist on what can be a humdrum chore.

Here’s a neat Meerkat Survival game that a family or group of kids could play.

Though it’s not from National Geographic, GeoGuessr is an interesting detective game using Google Street View.  You must try to derive the correct location by looking for clues in the photos.

If you are feeling very adventurous, then your family should try geocaching.  You can visit “Family Treasure Hunting” to learn more about this fun and educational activity.

from: “Strike up the Band” on ArtsEdge

This week, I am focusing on providing resources to “Squash the Summer Slide” as ReadWriteThink puts it. Parents often ask me at this time of year for ideas to keep my students challenged over the summer.  ArtsEdge is a great site for classroom ideas, but here are a few links to articles that might be especially interesting to parents who are looking for unique activities to occupy all of that extra time.

5 Activities for the Car and Grocery – I especially liked the idea of transforming a magazine photograph.

Summer Boredom Busters -  I did not see a lot of new ideas in this article, but there are a couple of website resources that could be helpful for finding art events happening around you.

Strike Up the Band; Creating Homemade Instruments – I think I might actually be able to make the straw oboe!

Set a Poem to Music  -  This is an actual lesson for 5th grade and up, but I think it could be modified for any age.  Wouldn’t it be fun to pick a picture book written in verse and make it into a song?

For other summer suggestions, you might want to visit my posts from Monday and Tuesday.