Jokes You Can Use:

 

Hey, did you hear that the Apple Car is almost ready. There is only one problem left.

They are having trouble installing Windows.

 

What did the sea say to the sand?

Nothing, it just waved.

 

Whenever I undress in the bathroom, the shower gets turned on.

 

Why was there music coming out of the printer?

The paper was jamming.

 

Why was the toilet paper rolling down the hill?

To get to the bottom.

 

Why did the scarecrow win a prize?

He was outstanding in his field.

 

I used to suffer from a soap addiction, but I’m clean now.

 

Can February March?

Well, no but April May.

 

Find your demographic:

Advisory:

Kids hand him their suicide notes. Now this musician has 120 of their names tattooed on his arm

Several years ago, Robb Nash received an urgent phone call from a high school principal. One of the school’s students had killed herself and in her suicide note revealed that she and a friend had a suicide pact. She didn’t say who.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/06/28/kids-hand-him-their-suicide-notes-now-this-musician-has-120-of-their-names-tattooed-on-his-arm/

 

The Secret World of Foley

Get to expose kids to another way to express talent.

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/06/16/secret-life-foley/

The Secret World of Foley from Short of the Week on Vimeo.

 

 

 

Humpty Dumpty

 

It’s a short, simple, AABB rhyme. Easy to remember, too, so it’s no mystery as to why it’s well-known. But there is a mystery buried within those twenty-six words, or, more accurately, omitted from them. Everyone agrees that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. But the rhyme doesn’t actually tell us that.

http://nowiknow.com/putting-it-together-again/

 

Solve the Cube

 

https://solvethecube.com/

 

The Secret Anti-Counterfeit Symbol

Have your student inspect a dollar bill. Tell them that there is a secret symbol on it to prevent counterfeiting. Challenge them to find it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c-jBfZPVv4

 

Middle School Science Minute  

by Dave Bydlowski (k12science or davidbydlowski@mac.com)

Science Writing

 

I was recently reading the April/May, 2016 issue of “Science Scope,” a magazine written for middle school science teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.  

 

In this issue, I read the Editor’s Roundtable column entitled, “Moving Beyond Traditional Science Writing.” It was written by Inez Liftig.  The focus of the column was on science teachers and ELA teachers collaborating to help students improve their writing.

 

http://k12science.net/Podcast/Podcast/Entries/2016/6/16_Middle_School_Science_Minute-Science_Writing.html

 

From the Twitterverse:  

Ashlyn Lazenby ‏@MsAshLaz Apr 3 Georgia, USA

Yes! Just one reason practicing writing is important!

Miguel Guhlin ‏@mguhlin

Miguel Guhlin Retweeted Tiggly

MT Why Every Child Needs To Be A ‘Stretchy Thinker,’ An Interview With Phyl, Founder & CEO of Tiggly …

Miguel Guhlin added,

Tiggly @TigglyKids

Why Every Child Needs To Be A ‘Stretchy Thinker,’ An Interview With Phyl, Founder & CEO of Tiggly http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-shulman-/why-every-child-needs-to-_b_10616758.html

via @HuffPostEdu

1 retweet 0 likes

 

Dave Schmittou

⚓️ ‏@daveschmittou

Do you remember any of the lessons taught by your teachers? If not, why are you teaching like they did?Undo the past

2 retweets 1 like

 

Chris Quinn ‏@ChrisQuinn64

So many of these ‘shifts’ are being addressed, so successfully and impactfully, at #ISTE2016 .

NCTE ‏@ncte

What Reading is Not http://bit.ly/2943fl0  via @ProfessorNana

43 retweets 39 likes

#mschat every Thursday at 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time.  And as Troy says, “The Twitter never stops!”  

 

Strategies:

 

What Doesn’t Work: Literacy Practices We Should Abandon

5 Less-Than-Optimal Practices

To help us analyze and maximize use of instructional time, here are five common literacy practices in U.S. schools that research suggests are not optimal use of instructional time:

1. “Look Up the List” Vocabulary Instruction
2. Giving Students Prizes for Reading
3. Weekly Spelling Tests
4. Unsupported Independent Reading
5. Taking Away Recess as Punishment

 

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/literacy-practices-we-should-abandon-nell-k-duke

 

Louisiana requires Cursive

 

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/06/louisiana_cursive_12th_grade.html

Resources:

OER

 

https://www.oercommons.org/

Literacy Test

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/farrahpenn/can-you-pass-this-1960s-louisiana-literacy-test?utm_term=.rbMmQLyka#.tjXXLzMqK

 

Web Spotlight:

 

13, right now

This is what it’s like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing

• She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.
• She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.
• Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too. She’s on it after it rings to wake her up in the mornings. She’s on it at school, when she can sneak it.
• Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out.
• The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts. The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.
• Somewhere, maybe at this very moment, neurologists are trying to figure out what all this screen time is doing to the still-forming brains of people Katherine’s age, members of what’s known as Generation Z. Educators are trying to teach them that not all answers are Googleable.
• “It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ”
• School is where she thrives: She is beloved by her teachers, will soon star as young Simba in the eighth-grade performance of “The Lion King” musical, and gets straight A’s.
• Her school doesn’t offer a math course challenging enough for her, so she takes honors algebra online through Johns Hopkins University.
• Some of Katherine’s very best friends have never been to her house, or she to theirs. To Dave, it seems like they rarely hang out, but he knows that to her, it seems like they’re together all the time. He tries to watch what she sends them — pictures of their family skiing, pictures of their cat Bo — but he’s not sure what her friends, or whomever she follows, is sending back.
• Even if her dad tried snooping around her apps, the true dramas of teenage girl life are not written in the comments.
• Like how sometimes, Katherine’s friends will borrow her phone just to un-like all the Instagram photos of girls they don’t like. Katherine can’t go back to those girls’ pages and re-like the photos because that would be stalking, which is forbidden.
• Or how last week, at the middle school dance, her friends got the phone numbers of 10 boys, but then they had to delete five of them because they were seventh-graders. And before she could add the boys on Snapchat, she realized she had to change her username because it was her childhood nickname and that was totally embarrassing.
• Then, because she changed her username, her Snapchat score reverted to zero. The app awards about one point for every snap you send and receive. It’s also totally embarrassing and stressful to have a low Snapchat score. So in one day, she sent enough snaps to earn 1,000 points.
• Snapchat is where flirting happens. She doesn’t know anyone who has sent a naked picture to a boy, but she knows it happens with older girls, who know they have met the right guy.
• Nothing her dad could find on her phone shows that for as good as Katherine is at math, basketball and singing, she wants to get better at her phone. To be one of the girls who knows what to post, how to caption it, when to like, what to comment.
• She’s working on her capstone project, a 12-page essay and presentation on a topic of her choice. At the beginning of the year, she chose “Photoshop and the media,” an examination of how women are portrayed in magazines.
• The whole world is at her fingertips and has been for years. This, Katherine offers as a theory one day, is why she doesn’t feel like she’s 13 years old at all. She’s probably, like, 16.
• “I don’t feel like a child anymore” she says. “I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of sixth grade” — when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter — “I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”
• Propping herself up on her peace-sign-covered pillow, she opens Instagram. Later, Lila will give her a Starbucks gift card. Her dad will bring doughnuts to her class. Her grandparents will take her to the Melting Pot for dinner. But first, her friends will decide whether to post pictures of Katherine for her birthday. Whether they like her enough to put a picture of her on their page. Those pictures, if they come, will get likes and maybe tbhs.
• They should be posted in the morning, any minute now. She scrolls past a friend posing in a bikini on the beach. Then a picture posted by Kendall Jenner. A selfie with coffee. A basketball Vine. A selfie with a girl’s tongue out. She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/wp/2016/05/25/2016/05/25/13-right-now-this-is-what-its-like-to-grow-up-in-the-age-of-likes-lols-and-longing/

 

Random Thoughts . . .  

 

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