Month: February 2019

Short weeks can be interesting. As a classroom teacher it meant trying to fit five days worth of learning into four. Seeing the students once a week has meant, no big difference, except that when I see my Monday classes I’m trying to fit 90 minutes of instruction into 45. There are other ways of scheduling but this late in the year making changes confuses everyone. Throw a two hour delay in on Wednesday and your plans for the week swiftly go out the window. If you think I’m complaining, I’m not. Changes, while maddening also give me the chance to be creative & try things that I may not have had the chance to otherwise.

This week grade 4-6 found themselves:

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West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

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Partially due to clean up time & lack of supplies- these classes got to visit Zork – a classic text based video game. A parsely game- one in which you type simple commands to move on. One of the original computer Role Playing Games. We began by discussing memory and how limited and expensive it was when home computing started. Heck, the Apollo guidance computer had 2k. I happen to have an Apple IIe and an original Macintosh in my lab. So we discuss kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes. Then we start and by the end most of the class has been dragged into Zork, frustrated, but enjoying themselves. Learning, through play. Without getting in details – think about it, these students (many reluctant readers) have to read to play. They need to decode and use context clues to determine what to do next. Then they have to problem solve since games like this are really ginormous puzzles. “I keep trying to break this with my fist, but it doesn’t know what a fist is!” One girl got more and more frustrated, but had stopped reading the description of where she was- that now said “an open window” so she could enter a new location.

Oh, the goal in 20ish minutes was to get into the kitchen, one of the first steps. Those that made it got a Hershey’s kiss. Once the first person did it the moans and groans of how impossible it was died down. The students learned perseverance or at least demonstrated it while playing. The students left my room many wanting to continue and bookmarking the site. I used Zorkonline.net which has a wide variety of text based games for free. I originally had the kids just do a google search on their chrome books for “Zork.” Yes, I did mention that this game was part of the book Ready Player One which may get some older kids to pick that book up.

Next on the docket:

Sixth grade will begin working on a personal project to coincide with the district Science/Engineering Fair.

Fifth grade will have a couple days to integrate their Valley Forge Day experience into either a comic (we’d been studying drawing) or their own parsely game. After that the plan is to finish the year with their rovers traveling across Mars and completing the missions from this year’s FLL game “Into Orbit.”

Fourth grade will return to their robots in preparation for the inaugural Indian Creek 500 – a robot race using light sensors to travel around a track. this is Indianapolis after all.

As with many Social Media thingies most get you to divulge more information about you to your public so you can make more connections and find that you are not alone or not as weird as you once thought. I participated in the 10 films in 10 days by just showing a still from the movie nothing else after being nominated by my older brother. Recently one has been bouncing around along the same vein- this one has to deal with books for a week and only showing the cover. I saw some colleagues nominated and decided instead of waiting I would just jump in and do it without being “nominated” but also without the pressure of having to nominate other people. “Instead of waiting to be asked by a real person I’ve accepted the challenge from an imaginary friend to post 7 books I love- no explanations, no reviews, just the cover I’d challenge someone, but I just thought it was a pretty awesome idea-“. I’ll add a sentence about each even though that wasn’t part of the initial piece, since this doesn’t have a character limit, why not. The covers are from the dictions I first read, so they might not be what you see if you hunt down the book. Remember “Never judge a book by its cover”

SO what’s my list?

• Just Only John by Jack Kent – A boy with an active imagination who wants more.

• The Wuggie Norple Story by Daniel Pinkwater & Tomie dePaolo – It’s got a cat in it and a whistle fixer- what else could you ask for?

• Big Bad Bruce by Bill Peet. My intro to Bill Peet back when I was “Mr. Bruce”

• The Brave Little Toaster by Thomas Disch. It was a book before a movie!

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline It was a book before a movie too and while I completely understand how difficult it would be to hold an audiences attention for hours of watching someone play Pac Man, “Never judge a book by its movie”

• Dream Park by Larry Niven & Steven Barnes. Holographic Roll Playing Game, with a murder mystery & in awesome amusement park? What’s not to love? Grab some cargo and find a copy.

• Another Fine Myth (Part of the Myth Adventures Series) by Robert Lynn Aspirin. My introduction to the genre “Comic Fantasy.” Full of puns and an amazing multiverse full of demons. As I always recommend when it comes to series- start at the beginning with Skeeve & Garkin.

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You’ll notice that these are either picture books or Science Fiction/Fantasy, as a Graphic Novel/Comics guy I’d need another list or two to decide what are my favorite in that medium. I say two because of All Ages vs. ummm… not all ages, because some comics just aren’t for kids. I’ll have to look into that for a future post.

So I wanted to publish a blog post every week and it’s now February and I’ve posted… yes, I failed. All I can do is try again. So let’s start off with something easy, like the weather.

This week we were assaulted by the “Polar Vortex” which still sounds like a really bad cartoon villain. Temperatures dropped, schools were closed, or delayed opening until it got warmer- which it didn’t. At least this time around we didn’t have people running around making jokes about “global warming” although I’m sure there were some comments tweeted out from Washington, that I may have missed. So school was closed for one day and delayed two days in a row. Parents either complained about being inconvenienced or the safety of their kids. Another reason I’m not an administrator- you can’t win. My school district even has it outlined in writing how the decision is made, and they followed their rules and still people were upset.

As a teacher, I want to see my students. I only see them 27 hours a year, if you do the math. Delayed days and missed days just give me less time with the kids. Delay days can almost be worse, but for many kids are very important. Working in a Title One school, some of my students may only get a decent meal at school, so a missed day doesn’t just mean missed learning, but also no food. So what do I do when my class time is trimmed by a third? By the time the students get out the supplies they need it will be time to clean up. So I decided to take a break from robotics and engineering and spend some time drawing.

When I started teaching I decided that while it was important to teach my first graders how to form letters, and hold a pencil, they also just needed to work on controlling the pencil. To this end I took at least one day a week and instead of going over how to make a “b” or a “d” we’d draw. I did some basics on my own and then found a book called “Draw Squad” written by Mark Kistler who had a show on PBS. It was great. The lessons were short enough that we could do them daily. There were 180 of them (there are 180 days in a school year). I used that book until it fell apart. Sold it in the class end of year auction, and bought another copy. I start off each year with some of the basics before moving on to building & robots. Last week, I used my shortened time to dive back into drawing with my students. I discovered that Mark Kistler was still around, and has a YouTube channel. So instead of learning from me, the classes and I learned from the master. I have decided not to share any drawings the kids made because they have been on hiatus for a while, but I’m right now trying to determine how to integrate it more into what I do every day, or at least every month. In this world of inflexible testing- the kids need a chance to be creative in more than just bricks & bots.

Thanks to the Polar Vortex & Mark Kistler for making me see that kids need to draw every day.