Yesterday I was with a friend who has his own renovation company.  In addition to doing amazing house renovations, he has shared his talent with the kids at our church. He has patiently taught them to use tools that some consider only the realm of adults, like hammers, saws and power drills.  He has worked with them to build amazing sets for their theatrical productions.  You should have seen the fire in the furnace!

I was thinking about tools and how much kids seem to enjoy using them.  Then I thought of all the skills they learn from using tools to make something – patience, planning, attention to detail, doing something in the right order, creativity, measuring, following safety rules, and the satisfaction of making something with their own hands.   I looked for more information about woodworking with kids and found Natural Papa’s page on woodworking. You can find links to woodworking instruction, tools and fun projects.  I like the instructions for making beginner stilts and the instructions for making an ant farm.  For general information on the use of tools, I like the woodworking tips from Kids Can Make It.

I know woodworking is probably difficult for a teacher to do alone, but parents could provide the needed extra hands.  Woodworking would also make a great after school or recess activity.

Unleash your inner carpenter!  

This dancing guy will make you smile and inspire you to follow your bliss.  TGIF

Do you remember the awkwardness of the first day of school.  My strongest memory is from junior high.  My maiden name was Cora Lee Flora – yes, it does rhyme.  I didn’t even think about it rhyming until that junior high teacher asked me, “Did your parents mean to name you that?”  I really had no answer.  I just smiled, he checked my name off his list and no one paid any more attention to my unusual name.  And yes, my parents did mean to name me that.

There are better ways to help your students get to know each other.  Education World has a whole list of first-day-of-school icebreakers.  I like the snowball idea.  Students write 3 things about themselves on sheets of paper, crumple the papers to make snowballs and have a snowball fight and then pick up the snowballs.  Each student has to find the student who wrote on his or her snowball and introduce that person to the class.

Other ideas in the article are to make time capsules, having students draw pictures that describe their interests and asking other students to say what they learn from the pictures, tossing beanbags as information is shared, using venn diagrams to share what students have in common, playing the alliteration name game (My name is Cora and I like cars, carrots and California) and making collages that express personalities.

One of my other favorite ideas from this article was to wear or bring something a little out of the ordinary that gives the students a hint of something you like to do or have done.  For example, wear a hat you bought on a vacation.  Tell students the hat is special to you.  Have them ask questions to figure out why.  The next day have students bring their own special objects and share their stories.

This is a relatively short, well-written article.  You can read about all these ideas and more.  I invite you to share any other unique icebreakers.

Sometimes you find interesting things in places you don’t expect.  While browsing I happened on the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising website for high school and college educators.  At first I just expected it to be a site students could use for research on the fashion industry, but I soon realized its greater potential.  In the Games That Teach section, students can learn about the olfactory system through the Workshop on the Making and Marketing of Fragrances.  You could follow up with other smell experiments.  High school students might also enjoy this YouTube video on smell.

There are many ways to use the Classroom Resources from FIDM.  Use the Career Facts and Figures when you teach students how to make tables and charts.  For example, have them make a chart that compares average salaries for different jobs or a chart that shows the relationship between years of experience and salaries.  You could use the Design Definitions for vocabulary expansion (particularly for students interested in fashion) or the Fashion Quotes as starters for essays.  Have students read the Book and Magazine Reviews and then write reviews of their own.  There are a zillion links for a student interested in fashion as a topic for a research paper.

The FIDM also offers grants to high school teachers.  If you are a teacher in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County or San Diego, you can apply for a field trip grant.  Teachers from anywhere can apply for a grant that would provide something fashion-related for the classroom.  Teachers can also win money from FIDM for submitting lesson plans ($250.00) or for explaining how they use the FIDM resources ($100.00).

If you are interested in fashion, I guarantee you will spend a lot of time exploring this site.  Have fun.

Going turtle hunting is even more fun that catching frogs – and OK only if the turtles are quickly released into the lake.  After finding such a great website on frogs, I decided to look for a similar one on turtles.  I didn’t find anything similar, but I did find KidsKonnect, which is a safe internet gateway for kids with extensive links on hundreds of topics.  When I looked for information on turtles, I found 62 links to other websites.

To be honest, I was initially interested in lake turtles, but I found more on sea turtles. Sea Turtle, Inc., a turtle hospital in Texas, has a website with lesson plans, kids’ activities and wonderful videos of turtles.  And the Sea Turtle Conservancy has a whole section just for kids called Turtle Tides.

Finally, check out these turtle links at Kidz Korner.

One summer when I was a kid there were so many frogs that they would jump into the cabin when someone opened the door.  We wore flip flops at night so we wouldn’t step on them.  I haven’t seen so many frogs in one place since, but I have seen how excited kids get when they find one hiding in the grass. Frogland has wierd frog facts, frog games, frog news, frog fables, a table of how to say frog in different languages, frog jokes, frog art and a list of frog books.  Less educational but lots of fun were the just for fun activities.  The frog personality quiz was fun, but what I really loved were the directions for making a loaf of bread shaped like a frog.  In addition to all these fun and interesting links, there is a teacher’s corner with more lesson ideas and links to other teaching programs.

This is truly a site for the frog-obsessed!

When I saw the Christian Marclay exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York, I realized some of his works would be great for teaching onomatopoeia.  Marclay is an artist and composer who combines images and music to create graphic scores. To give you an example, in his exhibit ZOOM ZOOM, he created a slideshow of onomatopoeias found in signs, advertising and packaging.  A musician can improvise a song by singing the onomatopoeia as the slides are shown.  For his piece MANGA SCROLL, he collaged onomatopoeias found in Manga comics on a sixty-foot-long handscroll.  To better understand how his work can be performed, look at this example on vimeo.  Both of these works could be used as a basis for a lesson on how to write using onomatopoeia.

I went searching for other interactive ways to teach onomatopoeia and found this onomatopoeia song.  I found a short interactive activity in a lesson offered by readwritethink.

I found a lot of lesson plans online, but very few intereractive activities.  After searching for quite a long time, I found two more interactive activities.  The BBC has a fun activity for younger students (without any strictly British-English words). Boardmaker has a memory game, but you have to get a free subscription to use it.  I searched some more and came across Mighty Book, a great source of  animated stories and songs.  You can use the story And the Caboose said ... to ask students to distinguish between quotations and onomatopoeia.

After looking at 30 pages of links, I decided that there are a lot of great lesson ideas for teaching onomatopoeia, but interactive tools for individual practice are extremely limited.  I’ll try to guide you toward some interesting lesson plans in a later post.

I had such fun with the New York Philharmonic website that I decided to google orchestra for kids once again to search for other good sites.  I came across the San Francisco Symphony Kids’ Site, which has excellent graphics and is easy to navigate. There aren’t as many interactive activities on SFS Kids, but the explanations and accompanying graphics for musical concepts are clear and attention-grabbing.  This would be a good site for students to get information about music theory and composers before they go to other activities that reinforce what they have learned.

The New York Philharmonic has an excellent website for kids.  It is well-designed, interactive and user-friendly and chock-full of wonderful activities.  Students can learn about instruments by making a character move through the instrument storage room. They can go to the dressing room to read bios of all the Philharmonic conductors and soloists or to the musicians lounge to find out more about the musicians in the current orchestra.  In the composers’ gallery, students can search for composers by country, birthday, style or name.  For fun, there is the newsstand with lots of fun facts and the game room with so many activities that you could spend a few hours just trying everything out.  But wait – there’s still more.  My two favorite sections are the instrument lab and composition workshop.  The instrument lab has instructions for making instruments from all over the world and the composition workshop lets kids experiment with creating their own music.

This is one of the best educational websites I have seen.  I could go on and on, but you really have to see it for yourself.  See if you can tear yourself away in less than an hour!

Being at the lake where internet access comes and goes is not the best place to write a blog.  It is a good place, however, to read newspapers and find ideas.  An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune lead me to kitchenpantryscientist, which is an excellent blog written by a woman who is both a scientist and an artist.  Her science activities are accompanied by photos and videos, thus making the directions very easy to follow. I want to try some of her activities myself.