Blogs

Offshore oil drilling has long been a controversial topic, and the debate ratcheted up a notch when a BP offshore drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico last month. At this writing, BP has installed a tube to siphon some of the 210,000 gallons of crude oil that had been spewing into the Gulf each day.

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."

We all know that kids love video games. Game-based learning, or GBL, can be an effective way to introduce new concepts and immerse students in material that has defined learning outcomes. Although much of the hoopla surrounding GBL refers to video game formats, game-based learning isn’t a new concept. Many traditional board games and card games fall under the umbrella of game-based learning, such as those offered by GameWright and others.

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.

Childhood obesity has become a major concern for nations worldwide. According to a recent report, the percentage of obese or overweight U.S. children is at or above 30% in 30 states. Childhood obesity rates in Canada have nearly tripled in the last 25 years, while in Europe, one in five children is either overweight or obese. In an attempt to curb the battle of the bulge, Massachusetts, Arkansas, and New York City all now require schools to calculate students’ BMI (Body Mass Index) to determine obesity. Many schools have completely revamped their cafeteria offerings, and booted vending machines from their campuses.

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.

Whenever I talk to students about ancient cultures, they seem to divide into two camps. There are the kids who find it cool to learn about how ancient peoples lived, and then there are the kids who don’t quite see the point (“hello, they’re, like, dead!”). Generally, though, most students come around to like learning about ancient civilizations, and to see that despite the centuries that separate us, we still share many of the same concerns and problems as ancient cultures.

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?

Over the past several years, my 12 year-old has had to deal with a teacher battling breast cancer (successfully), another teacher whose young husband ultimately lost his battle with cancer during the school year, a friend whose father is dying, and a teammate who is currently in remission. As you can imagine, it’s brought on a lot of discussion in our house. What’s been missing, though, is a discussion of it in the classroom. It’s not been uncommon to hear the kids talk about cancer during a carpool session – “What exactly is cancer? What does it do to your body?” It’s a topic that lurks in the shadows, and one that many adults don’t want to discuss.

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.