Texas, Textbooks and Truth
It seems at least once a month we read a news story about dubious education practices that spawn national outrage. This week’s news featured pages from a geography textbook that identified Africans forced into the horrific transatlantic slave trade as “workers” and “immigrants.” Here’s the story: 15-year-old Coby Burren took a picture of a fishy page from the textbook and sent it to his mother, a former teacher and current Ph.D. student, with a text message: “[W]e was real hard workers, wasn’t we ☹.”
Author Bill Zimmerman's Treasure Chest
All you have to do to think more creatively and to imagine and dream is take a few minutes and let your heart respond to the question prompts below. They will encourage you to view your world differently, to see new possibilities, and make new choices. The first set of prompts are from my book, Make Beliefs: A Gift For Your Imagination. Please share your written Make Beliefs responses with us, some of which will be posted on this web site's BLOG With Bill Zimmerman page. You can also see Make Beliefs for Kids of all Ages and my NEW E -BOOK: Make Beliefs to Spark Your Writing.
10 Thanksgiving Writing Prompts Inspired by Children's Literature
Want to do a little Thanksgiving writing in your classroom this year? Look no further than some of your favorite children's books for inspiration. 1.
Playing History
Open Feedback Dialog your source for historical games Browse Items (18 total) Do I Have A Right
Rewriting History—for the Better
Illustration by Julie Flett It was pure coincidence that, during a recent trip to Northern California’s wine country, Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., stumbled upon a perfect illustration of what’s wrong with history instruction in the United States. He and his wife were visiting an original Spanish mission at the same time as a group of fourth-graders. Gover watched as teachers and chaperones dressed as Franciscan friars led the children, who were dressed as Indians, through a series of quaint activities. “They were making candles. They were spinning wool, weaving baskets.
Grammar: Interactive Writing Activities
Global rating average: 0.0 out of 50.00.00.00.00.0 These sites feature interactive grammar and writing sites that are fun to use with SMARTboards. The online games and quizzes cover topics such as nouns, verbs, sentences, proofreading, capitalization, punctuation, plurals, and more. There are links to an eThemes Resource on writing prompts and to the eThemes index that leads to many more resources on grammar and writing topics.
Creative writing prompts that you can do in 10 minutes
What can you write in 10 minutes or less? Let’s find out! For a quick creative writing exercise, try one of the 20 writing prompts below, excerpted from Chronicle Books’ 642 Tiny Things to Write About.
“What’s ‘Colorism’?”
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer When I began teaching in Boston, I was struck by how often students of color referred to each other as “light-skinned” or “dark-skinned.” Almost daily, I witnessed high school students identify, categorize and stereotype their peers based on skin tone.
Schools
BoomWriter lets you easily incorporate and experience the benefits of technology as your students are engaged in the following (or similar) standards-based learning activities: Grade 3 CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.3.3 - Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences. Using BoomWriter’s feature allowing teachers to create their own story start, students collaboratively create imagined multi-paragraph personal narratives using a teacher generated prompt (e.g. “When I woke up on Saturday morning, I had no idea I was in for the craziest day of my entire life…”). Grade 5
