Story Problems

With summer rapidly approaching, my students have kicked into funny sayings overdrive.  Here's a sampling for you.

After returning from a workshop with stencils, coloring posters and books, I decided to show the kids the wealth of new materials.  Needless to say they were absolutely delighted with each new goody that came out of the bag.  One of the boys, positively shaking with excitement, yelled out, "Mr. B, you're hippotizing me with all of these things!"

I used the SmartBoard to introduce story problems.  The children did wonderfully figuring out the problems but didn't catch onto the story aspect.  One sample subtraction problem included me and the janitor eating cookies.  

The next day the lunch lady asked me what I had been telling the kids about cookies.  After some thought I remembered the story problem.  When I asked her how she knew about it, she told me one of my students had tried to get her to come talk to me about eating her cookies without asking.  That afternoon he found her and told her she wouldn't have such a problem if she just bought more cookie dough.

OK folks, that's two stories for you.  We'd love to hear some of yours.

Resources I Love

Yes folks, it's time for another edition of Resources I Love.  And to kick it off, what could be better than the ability to locate the other side of the world?  Pop on over to Antipodr, where you can plug in your location and see where you'd end up if you tunneled through the Earth.  It makes for a fun activity as you're teaching geography.  

If you're in more of a poetic frame of mind you need to check out Wordle.  As their website states, 

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

What a super way to create an original bulletin board display.  Have students create their word cloud, print out the work and hang them up.  To add to the visual impact, they can illustrate their work.

And last, but certainly not least, it seems as if Lego is about to launch cell phones and cameras made out of everyone's favorite plastic brick toy.  This probably doesn't count as a true resource yet but I haven't been this excited since the special edition Mr. Potato Head, "Darth Tater."  

While the phone may turn out to be a hoax, we do know, "The company has formed a partnership with Las Vegas firm Digital Blue to manufacture a range of Lego-based electrical goods which are a world away from its traditional toy bricks.  The fully functioning range of gadgets also includes alarm clocks and a so-called 'boom box' - an all-in-one CD and radio player."

I hope you find these helpful folks, or at least fun, and look forward to hearing about what resources YOU are using in the classroom.

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Make Your Own Presidential Museum

On the off chance you didn't catch Amy Borrell's Make Your Own Presidential Museum lesson, you should definitely check it out. This is a fun activity that can even be modified for young students. Make sure to click on her resource tab as well; she has some super links, like the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum Video Preview. Enjoy!

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