Blog Archives

Tomorrow's Technology Today: Hero

6/30/2020

What do you notice about this new technology?
Are there any problems with it?
What are the benefits?

What do you wonder? Make a list of questions.

What would make this product even better?

How could you use this product?
Tell a short story.

For more exercises like this one, find our Tomorrow's Technology Today page.

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Avast!

6/29/2020

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Art Appreciation

Study the artwork below.

What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
What is happening?
Write your thoughts.

Underwater Archaeology

We will use portions of this
Underwater Archaeology packet
from North Carolina for today's activities.

Mood Music

Draw a picture to show the scene that comes to mind as you listen to this music. Be ready to write a story to go along with your picture and share it with the class.

So You Want to Be a Pirate

Even pirates had/have rules. What rules do you think the pirates would require in order to protect themselves, their cargo, and their personal "treasures"?

Blackbeard and Queen Anne's Revenge

TLAP

You, too, can learn to talk like a pirate:
How to Talk Like a Pirate.

Map Maker, Make Me a Map

Now you get to be the one with the secret treasure, but be sure to make a map to it, so you won't forget where you buried it! We will follow up by writing organized paragraphs based on the setting of the X on your map (where the treasure is buried).

Explore more

Famous Pirate: Blackbeard

Queen Anne's Revenge

While We're on the Subject

Let's divvy up the booty today and have students become the experts. Your group will be responsible for studying one of the following Wonders. After a period of time, the teacher will ask your group to report to the whole class about what you learned in the article you read.

Do All Pirate Ships Have Flags?
Do All Pirates Have Beards?
Why Do Pirates Say Arrr!?
Did Blackbeard Really Exist?
What Is the Curse of Oak Island?
Have You Ever Searched for Hidden Treasure?

Putrid Pirates

Here's a way to present some of the same serious information to make it fun. Which method of presentation would you rather watch - the Smithsonian videos above or this one (right) from Horrible Histories?

Music Appreciation

Surf's Up

Night Vision, Pirate Style

In every pirate movie, it seems like there is at least one character who wears an eyepatch. One explanation for this is that it aids with seeing at night. The video here explains and dismisses this explanation.

Buried Treasure

Could there be buried treasure nearby? What could that be about?

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Quote: Initiative

6/28/2020

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“I could either watch it happen
or be a part of it.”
Elon Musk

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Music Appreciation: Fly Like an Eagle

6/27/2020

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Students are often called upon
to read "chorally".
That is, they read together
simultaneously as a group.

Repeating this practice assists
young readers with reading fluency -
the speed, accuracy, and inflection
of oral reading.

Why not, since it's called "choral" reading anyway, actually read the chorus of a song?

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Mood Music: Fort Battle

6/26/2020

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Sometimes, when we go to the movies or as we watch a show on TV, we are transported into the plot. Directors understand that their selection of background music can change and enhance a scene.

Now it is time to turn it around. This time, the music comes first. Do not watch the video; instead, let the music lead your imagination. As it plays, allow it to transport you into a scene that has yet to be written. Then, write the scene. Use all the visual imagery you can muster in your writing. At the end, you will share your writing. Will it stand on its own, without the music in the background?

Close your eyes.

Listen to the music.

Create a visual story in your mind.

Write your story as you listen a second time.

Tweak your scene.

Share your scene with the class.

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Book: Squint

6/25/2020

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Squint presents the reader with real situations and raw emotions. Sure, you may not have a chronic eye disease like Flint, and you may not share a similar family as McKell, but you will relate to these characters as they deal with life. Authors Chad Morris and Shelly Brown have constructed such a story to draw out the best of these characters who face their own very serious, personal issues.

From Goodreads:

My name is Flint, but everyone in middle school calls me Squint because I’m losing my vision. I used to play football, but not anymore. I haven’t had a friend in a long time. Thankfully, real friends can see the real you, even when you can’t clearly see.

Flint loves to draw. In fact, he’s furiously trying to finish his comic book so he can be the youngest winner of the “Find a Comic Star” contest. He’s also rushing to finish because he has keratoconus—an eye disease that could eventually make him blind.

McKell is the new girl at school and immediately hangs with the popular kids. Except McKell’s not a fan of the way her friends treat this boy named Squint. He seems nice and really talented. He draws awesome pictures of superheroes. McKell wants to get to know him, but is it worth the risk? What if her friends catch her hanging with the kid who squints all the time?

McKell has a hidden talent of her own but doesn’t share it for fear of being judged. Her terminally ill brother, Danny, challenges McKell to share her love of poetry and songwriting. Flint seems like someone she could trust. Someone who would never laugh at her. Someone who is as good and brave as the superhero in Flint’s comic book named Squint.

Squint is the inspiring story of two new friends dealing with their own challenges, who learn to trust each other, believe in themselves, and begin to truly see what matters most.

There comes a point in the last 40 pages of this Mark Twain Award nominee where the raw honesty of the dialogue becomes inspiriting, and you just know that Flint and McKell are on the right track to closure. I have often said that when a story can bring out my own emotions - whatever those emotions may be: anger, excitement, joy, or sorrow - that's how I know the authors have been successful. This book finally reached that pinnacle point, and I enjoyed it.

It even covers the idea that bullying may just be teasing, and teasing may be for the sake of a laugh and not out of malicious intent. Flint does a good job of using humor against his former friend whom he believes is picking on him. He finds out that he may not have lived up to his own responsibilities toward the former friend. The thoughts along this line go along well with some of the resilience training I try to incorporate into my classroom, which correlates to the materials from Brooks Gibbs.

This author team also wrote last year's Mark Twain nominee, Mustaches for Maddie, of which I was impressed, but not overly thrilled to read. The ideas behind the plot of Squint were much more original. While the former was more personal for the authors, it just seemed like they struggled to keep the story in pace with their own experiences. The latter, however, flowed quite naturally and had a life of its own. Squint is definitely one of the better books on this year's award list for the state of Missouri, if not the best.

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History Mythbusting I

6/24/2020

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History is not there for you to like or dislike... It is there for you to learn from.

Lt. Colonel Allen West's recent response when being interviewed on the television news may be one that is quoted for many years. It goes along with my constant mantra that history is ugly, but it also explains the reason we study the ugliness. It may be too cliché to repeat that history repeats itself. If we don't want that ugliness from the past repeating itself in the present age, we must learn from the mistakes in history.

That said, it's also well-known that history is the first core subject that teachers drop in elementary school with the excuse that they don't have time for it and that they are mandated to focus on "more important" subjects like Reading and Math.

How is that mindset working for us now? It may be one of the reasons our world is facing civil unrest, protests, and anarchy. In fact, as we feel ourselves squeezing our own defining moments, this year, our hope is that generations can learn from the mistakes currently being made and how those mistakes are fixed.

History is boring.

The first claim in an article about why history is a failing subject in education says that History is boring. To that, I respond using one of the favorite words of the day: this is a systemic problem. It is generational, passed on from teacher to student, parent to child.

Let's just say that History is Boring should rarely be true in a classroom. Here is what we do in our fourth grade class to make sure it isn't:

Don't give away the ending. I like to let students discover things along the way. I try to start with some academic rigor, showing a piece of art or playing some appropriate music to get students thinking. In many cases, I will also ask two questions to start the conversation: What do you notice? and What do you wonder? I want to get students to go beyond what they already know and start to discover details about something they don't know. Academic rigor is not about making things more and more difficult; it is about activating knowledge and applying it in a new direction. When done properly, students enjoy the challenge, and their advanced conversations can be very rewarding for the teacher in the room. As the teacher, you may also choose to guide the thinking once you have their initial thoughts. There are ways to do this with paper and pencil that are not just worksheets on which to answer questions, but tools for students to collect their own relevant thoughts. Watch John Spencer's explanation in the short video below.

Start in a mysterious way. Learning about history is not boring when students enter the room to find something different in the morning. Why not teach with a simulated archaeological dig in the center of the room or give some clues to a mystery for students to mull over when they arrive? Why not present an early morning building challenge or play a character for a few minutes? Dave Burgess has collected lots of "hooks" in his book Teach Like a Pirate. Many of his hooks involve presentation skills - not content, not methodology, but style. Applied at any level, such presentation skills can be a really good friend to the teacher. Any time you can ignite your lesson to make it more shocking, more beautiful, more intriguing, you will draw your students more deeply into the concepts you are presenting.

Use video and movement. With the availability of online video content, there is no excuse for teacher not curating support for a lesson. We do watch videos in our fourth grade classroom, but we do so with purpose, and if it's not presented or produced well, I leave it be. That being said, we don't always rely on video products to present the core of the lesson, but they often do support various aspects of a lesson to provide clarity. We use them to provide a foundation for creative projects, as well. These videos keep our eyes moving and our minds engaged. We're using our ears to get a feel for the events of history. I want my students to consider more than just the facts of the lesson; they must consider what a scene must have sounded like, smelled like, looked like. I want them to "feel" the emotion, the agony, the struggle, and the victory.

Find a musical connection. Music in our classroom is not always relegated to the background. Instead, it often moves to the forefront. I have preselected musical writing activities called Mood Music. I play the music, true to the period or the mood of the historical event we will learn about, and students sketch a scene that comes to mind. Of course, the scene is probably not the one from the upcoming lesson, but it gets us into the right mindset to carry through to the history. Once we have shared our sketches, I give students time to write the scene to go with the illustrations. This can become a part of a Writers Block to carry through with the theme during other parts of the day. Another way we use music is something we call Music Appreciation. This is a collection of lyric videos for a variety of songs. I have selected some of these to embed with the history lessons in order to tie the past with the present. Plus, this allows us to work on reading fluency as students read and sing along with the video as the words appear on the screen.

Bateau Excursion, Lake Champlain, Fort Ticonderoga Teacher Institute

Connect with real places. The locations of historical events still exist. I've been fortunate enough to attend some teacher institutes in recent years at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, George Washington's Mount Vernon, and Fort Ticonderoga. I've also been accepted to attend the next institute at Colonial Williamsburg. While at each of these, I took hundreds of photos, hold even more memories, and gained a whole lot of knowledge about the events that took place in those locations. Remembering one of my favorite middle school teachers, I know the value of bringing those places to life for my students. Miss Ruminer was her name, and she conjured great images of ancient Egypt due to her personal visits to Tutankhamun exhibits there. When I get excited about my personal experiences and bring those into the classroom, my students naturally pick up on the excitement, and the whole teaching experience becomes more enjoyable for us all. I would encourage every teacher to attend these type of institutes whenever possible and start building your own repertoire of materials and ideas collected along the way.

Make it real and relevant. It is not boring when students can see how the events of the past connect with the events of the present. That's easiest to see with the racial injustices that have prevailed in our nation and around the planet throughout history. When we connect the delivering letters to the West Coast of the United states by ship, delivering letters via the Pony Express, the advent of telegraph, telephones, radio, television, and internet, and cellular technologies, we better understand the power of the media and the advancement of other technologies and cultural standings in society. That timeline advances exponentially in the 21st century! My students (nine-year-olds) usually don't have much experience with any of these thoughts; it's new to them. They see the ugliness of history at an early age - the massacres of indigenous peoples, bandit attacks on wagon trains, the greed debauchery of the gold rush, for example - and they understand the need to understand how those events occurred. Right or wrong, our history is our history, and it must be studied to help us in our current situations.

Students Explore Primary Sources and Material Culture

Go big. Think beyond the book. We'll talk about this more later, but suffice it to say that if you're sticking to the textbook and not bringing in primary artifacts and original documents, you are doing your students a disservice. Too often have we left history to biased textbook publishers who have hunted for the prettiest pictures and made sure to tick the boxes of state requirements, and packaged everything up with nice bows. Students deserve to see real representations of what they are studying. That means you have break out of the "four walls" of a textbook, find some original documents and material culture with which everyone can interact. Of course, you're not going to acquire the real things, but representations and models, even photographs or video connections with people who do have that kind of access, will bring everything to life for your class - much more than the uneventful pictures, graphics, and authored paragraphs of a traditional textbook. Don't just make history class into another reading block with comprehension questions at the end of a reading!

Please do not allow your students the luxury of sleeping through your history lessons. I know much of the problem here is systemic in that the subject has been put in the dusty corner in favor of "more important" subjects like reading and math, and I realize many, many educators are unfamiliar with their own standards and information (Translation: colleges have focused more on processes and have turned teachers into the profession without the knowledge they need to be experts.). We'll have to address some of these excuses and reasons in later posts. Please check back here in for more History Mythbusting to come.

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Jamestown Vs. Plymouth

6/23/2020

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There is so much more to the story than the Disney movies portray concerning John Smith and Pocahontas. In his video, Mark Summers, Director of Public and Youth programs for Jamestown Rediscovery, discusses how Captain John Smith became a symbol of the rivalry between Jamestown, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts. There is a lot of rich history in this 10-minute presentation, but Mr. Summers presents it in very understandable language and as a person who knows his subject. It is interesting to put the two stories - of Jamestown and of Plymouth - in one place and note the interactions or rivalries that existed at the time.

Why is America the land of the Pilgrims' pride? When did New England begin to be called New England? Where did John Smith get his great quote, “He that will not work shall not eat”? All of this is covered in Mr. Summers' video here.

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1619

6/22/2020

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Word Wise

Define the following words: democracy, tobacco, and diversity

Number of the Day

What can you tell me about the number 1,619?

Art Appreciation

Analyze the famous painting shown here (left). Check out the details.

What do you notice?
What do you think is happening?
What caused the scene in the painting?
What might happen after the scene shown?
What does this piece make you wonder?

Guardians of Jamestown

Things get pretty heavy for us with today's topic of conversation - the arrival of "20 and odd" people from Angola in Africa in Virginia. Knowing more about their arrival and treatment, 400 years ago, can help us understand some of the issues we face today. Let's begin with the presentation in the video (right).

Concerning the enslaved people, let's also use a lesson plan provided by American Evolution.

20 and Odd

Listen to this newspaper advertisement from 1736 concerning a runaway slave.

"20 and odd" people arrived on Virginia soil from Angola, Africa, on August 20, 1619. These became the first enslaved people in the land now known as the United States, kicking off a terrible history of oppression, mistreatment, unfair treatment, unequal opportunity, and racism. We will use primary sources with this part of the lesson: Arrival of Africans to Virginia in 1619.

Tobacco

Take a look at the vein patterns on a tobacco leaf. We will take some time to study the parts of a plant, including the leaf. We can also use this lesson: Tobacco in Jamestown.

The teacher has prepared some tobacco leaves (construction paper). Notice the veins of the leaves.

Think of something that has many parts. Write the item on the back of your tobacco leaf. On each vein, write one of the parts of the item. This could be used to organize a paragraph about your selected topic.

The Real First Thanksgiving

For a long time, teachers have taught about the "first Thanksgiving" happening in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with the Pilgrims and the Native People congregating around a common table for a feast. How has Plymouth taken that title when we know so clearly that there was a Thanksgiving in Jamestown before Plymouth was Plymouth?

Check out (The Real) Thanksgiving Meal. What do you think of that menu? Is there anything that could be added?

Mail-Order Brides

We will use primary documents with this lesson: English Women Come to America.

The Birth of Democracy in America

What kind of laws would a new settlement need?
Do you think any of the laws were unjust? Unfair?
How does a representative government work?

Wonder what those first moments of government in Jamestown might have been like? We'll spend some time with this lesson: Government in Jamestown, 1619.

Music Appreciation

The Fear
Flying on My Own

True Colors
Welcome to Your Life

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I Got Chills / They're Multiplyin'

6/21/2020

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I got chills they're multiplyin'
And I'm losing control
'Cause the power you're supplyin'
It's electrifyin'!

It's time to Grease the wheels a bit before we begin our fourth grade year. Below is a series of panels I'm sending to parents and students over a period of several days in hopes that they will work on multiplication fluency and mastery before the first day of school in August. You may click each one to view it.

These panels are also posted and easy to find on our HOGGATTEERS@HOME website.

Just scroll down on the home page to find them.

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First Day of Summer

6/20/2020

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What a wild year it has been! As spring has blended with the summer over the past four months, our brains have been jiggled and jostled in a bunch of different ways. Since today is the official day of summer, I find myself praying for everyone's safety and health (physical and mental).

I know I don't have to tell Hoggatteers this, but others may need to hear it:

Stay cool.
Stay safe.

Stay healthy.
Stay awesome!

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Quote: Character

6/19/2020

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“Character cannot be developed
in ease and quiet.
Only through experience of trial and suffering
can the soul be strengthened,
vision cleared,
ambition inspired,
and success achieved.”
(Helen Keller)

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Mood Music: The World Turned Upside Down

6/18/2020

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Close your eyes.

Listen to the music.

Create a visual story in your mind.

Write your story as you listen a second time.

Tweak your scene.

Share your scene with the class.

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Misspellings XII

6/17/2020

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What we have here is a
failure to communicate!

Find the misspelled word in each
of these pictures. Write and correct each word on your paper.

Click for more Misspellings.

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Book: Amal Unbound

6/16/2020

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Here is something different and unexpected. While the cover art turned me off, and I wouldn't normally pick up a book about a kid living in Pakistan, the story of Amal Unbound was an interesting one. As much as I try to get students to try new things, I am reminded that I need to take my own advice.

Author Aisha Saeed has captured a unique situation, one that is perhaps uncomfortable but certainly unfamiliar to most readers in our area.

From Goodreads:

The compelling story of a girl’s fight to regain her life and dreams after being forced into indentured servitude.

Life is quiet and ordinary in Amal’s Pakistani village, but she had no complaints, and besides, she’s busy pursuing her dream of becoming a teacher one day. Her dreams are temporarily dashed when–as the eldest daughter–she must stay home from school to take care of her siblings. Amal is upset, but she doesn’t lose hope and finds ways to continue learning. Then the unimaginable happens–after an accidental run-in with the son of her village’s corrupt landlord, Amal must work as his family’s servant to pay off her own family’s debt.

Life at the opulent Khan estate is full of heartbreak and struggle for Amal–especially when she inadvertently makes an enemy of a girl named Nabila. Most troubling, though, is Amal’s growing awareness of the Khans’ nefarious dealings. When it becomes clear just how far they will go to protect their interests, Amal realizes she will have to find a way to work with others if they are ever to exact change in a cruel status quo, and if Amal is ever to achieve her dreams.

While the ending was a little convenient, I'm not sure how it would have worked differently. When you read this book, you will find yourself cringing from time to time as Amal, the main character, takes risks you won't like and encounters an antagonist who will make you angry. The best books bring emotion out of their readers.

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Art Appreciation

Underwater Archaeology

Mood Music

So You Want to Be a Pirate

Blackbeard​ and Queen Anne's Revenge

TLAP

Map Maker, Make Me a Map

Explore more

While We're on the Subject

Putrid Pirates

Music Appreciation

Night Vision, Pirate Style

Buried Treasure

History is boring.

Word Wise

Number of the Day

Art Appreciation

Guardians of Jamestown

20 and Odd

Tobacco

The Real First Thanksgiving

Mail-Order Brides

The Birth of Democracy in America

Music Appreciation

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History in Residence

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