Peggy's blog

Teacher: We are going to start our unit on statistics today. It's going to be really fun! (Cue collective class groan.) We are going to use an online game called Quest Atlantis to help us out. (Hmmm...the students may be coming around...) I'll pass out this comic book to start. It will tell us the background of Atlantis before we get started with our Quest. (Our Quest? Has our teacher gone crazy?) It's quiet as the students start reading the comic books. A student from the back whispers, "Wow, this might actually be kinda cool."

You can hardly turn on the TV any more without seeing some kind of a message about healthy eating. Jamie Oliver is trying to change school cafeterias in his “Food Revolution” series while “The Biggest Loser” shows contestants learning to eat right and exercise to lose weight. In between shows on the Disney Channel, my kids love watching “Captain Carlos” and “Tasty Time With ZeFronk,” both shorts that target healthy eating for the preschool set. We might enjoy watching this type of programming, but are our kids truly taking the healthy eating message to heart? Despite all of the publicity, the figures Joann cited in her Battle of the Bulge post are astounding. Our kids don’t seem to be getting any thinner.

According to Winston Churchill, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” It’s exciting to learn about civilizations before us, but it can be even better to learn about those cultures in a hands-on, rich environment. The PBS resources from Egypt’s Golden Empire use multimedia tools and a variety of different activities to introduce the topic. Students work individually, in small groups, and as a whole class. They are challenged to think about the culture as they create projects on the topic. Looking at these resources got me wondering about how a teacher can best organize and implement all of the great activities they discover and develop throughout each school year.

The LIVESTRONG resources in Joann’s picks this week shed light on a very important topic in many of our lives and the lives of our students. A cancer diagnosis can bring questions that you, the educator, may be unprepared to answer. The LIVESTRONG resources give you tools to tackle the subject with confidence. The resources are very comprehensive, including student and teacher reproducible materials, extension activities, and videos. They even have a booklet that goes along with an ARTHUR PBS Go episode called “The Great MacGrady” to introduce the topic to younger students. The problem remains that I discussed in the last post, though. How do we integrate this into our standards-based teaching?

Do you want to do a water conservation activity in your class for Earth Day, but you are scrambling to make sure you cover all the mandated standards by the end of the school year? With standardized testing taking place in many of our schools right now, it’s the perfect time to introduce activities that break the monotony, especially if those activities are easily aligned to our state standards. Try our new tool on The Gateway this week so you can do both. When you find a resource you want to use in your class, you can get state standard suggestions for this resource using CNLP's Content Assignment Tool (CAT) and JES & Co.'s Achievement Standards Network (ASN). This tool will suggest which of your state standards are aligned to the resource you plan on using in your class.

As April arrives and I think about my own taxes, I realize how little I understand about how income taxes work. Benjamin Franklin believed “… in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.

Math: you either love it or hate it. Some people get it and some people feel kind of like Scottish comedian Billy Connolly when he said, “I don't know why I should have to learn Algebra... I'm never likely to go there.” If your students are asking where they will ever use math in the future and you are wondering how to show them what an important tool math is, maybe it’s time to try some new activities. There are some really neat resources online for struggling students and for those who just need a little change of pace in the math classroom. Let’s not treat math like a required class that we just have to push our students through so they can pass the test. Math can be fun, too!

Leonardo da Vinci once wrote, “Study the science of art and the art of science.” As an artist, observer, scientist, and inventor, da Vinci showed us the importance of having a well-rounded set of skills and knowledge. Many of us aspire to create this kind of thinker in all of our students. 93% of Americans agree the arts are vital to providing a well-rounded education, according to a 2005 Harris Poll commissioned by Americans for the Arts. Meryl Streep asserts that “Young people who learn the arts do better in every phase of their lives.” Despite this, funding for art education is one of the first things many districts decide to cut when budgets are tight.

There is an amazing variety of educators on The Gateway to 21st Century Skills. We are linked together by the common goal of making a difference in the lives of our students while still having time to maintain a life of our own outside the classroom. We teach a wide range of grade levels and subjects, and we all want to equip our students with the right skills to succeed in the 21st century. When we cook a meal, we need a full set of spices to create just the right flavor. In teaching, we need to use a full range of tools and types of activities to complement the variety of students and teachers working together to become productive members of 21st century society.

In previous posts, Joann and I have advocated the use of Web 2.0 tools and other emerging technologies in the classroom. We have tossed around ideas about using cell phones, wikis, and social networking in class. Teachers are using these tools to help students understand, summarize, collaborate, and present ideas in subjects from art to math and everything in between. Many of these tools allow for a greater level of interactive communication among students and between students and teachers. With this increased interactive communication, there is a new platform for the age-old problem of bullying.