Patty Kohler’s round table review requires minimal teacher effort. Students can ‘sign in’ by placing their magnets in the appropriate answer column.” Each day, post a question and possible answers on a whiteboard. “Write each child’s name on a strip of tag board, laminate it, and glue a magnet to the back. The Pennsylvania State Education Association describes a novel way for students to sign in to class. contains blank outline maps of every country, province, state, and territory in the world. (Classical civilization hangman, anyone?) Citing the Common Core’s emphasis on cultural literacy, the site also offers short cultural literacy quizzes for every day of the school year. ’s geography questions for grades 6–12 align with the Common Core State Standards.
On the hilarious Writing Prompts That Don’t Suck Tumblr blog, prompt 570 challenges students to write “a story about a massive cat colony and the one human who knows about its existence.” In contrast, WriteSource categorizes more orthodox writing topics (“the hardest thing I’ve ever done”) by grade level. Watch the students in this inspiring video talk about how much they learned from the experience.
Animals A to Z is the primary grade version: “The skills emphasized in the series are those found on all standardized tests in grades 2 and 3: simple word usage, end-of-sentence punctuation, comma placement in a series, basic spelling, and others.” Reading and Writingįor an entire school year, ninth graders in Sarah Gross’s and Jonathan Olsen’s humanities classes at High Technology High School in New Jersey started each day by reading The New York Times and composing current event essays. Like its cousin, Daily Oral Language, Education World’s Every-Day Edits features a new error-filled text for students to diagnose and rewrite every day of the school year. Despite video evidence, Bruce Lee never played ping pong with nunchaku-but he could have.
Have students identify horror movie or police procedural tropes, then reveal the answers from TVTropes to see how many they selected.Ĭhallenge students to deduce whether a story is true, a scam, or an urban legend using scenarios featured in TruthorFiction, Hoax Busters and Snopes. In the tempting fate trope, for example, the hero says, “At least it’s not raining.” An instant later, she’s drenched. “Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations,” according to TVTropes, a wiki that houses hundreds of these figurative concepts. How come?Īnswer: He’s a priest-he’s marrying them to other people, not to himself. Situation: A man marries 20 women in his village but isn’t charged with polygamy. Even better are its lateral thinking puzzles.
Lateral Thinkingīrain Food lists number and logic puzzles. After five minutes, I ask if anyone in the class wishes to share good news. Some of my students volunteered to write joy journals before each class this semester. Education blogger Vicki Davis writes 20 things she is thankful for in a joy journal, citing research studies indicating that this practice produces greater long-term happiness than winning the lottery-serious happy.