Kids Bowl Free - A Summer Activity for Rainy Days

I had planned an outdoor activity for Mother's Day (a cruise in Casco Bay) but the pouring rain cancelled that plan. So instead we went to a relatively new bowling alley that had lots of other families this afternoon. The experience reminded me of a free program called Kids Bowl Free. 

For the tenth year in a row Kids Bowl Free is offering two free games per day to students in the United States and Canada. Kids Bowl Free is a program funded by bowling alleys to provide students with a safe and fun activity during the summer.

To receive coupons for up to two free games of bowling per day, parents need to register on Kids Bowl Free. Each bowling center sets its own start and end date for the program so check the listings for a bowling center in your area.

The History of Mother's Day

Happy 1st Mother's Day to Jess.
Isla's awesome mom!

Happy Mother's Day to all of the moms reading my blog today! Hi Mom! (Yes, my mom reads my blog). Until today I never really wondered about the origin of Mother's Day. So I did what most people do when they wonder about something now, I Googled it and found the following short video from History.com.


Applications for Education
It's probably too late for a relevant lesson this year, but bookmark this video and use it next year for a short flipped lesson that you create in EDpuzzle or TES Teach.

DocsTeach Adds New Analysis Activities for Students

DocsTeach is a great resource for teachers of U.S. History. DocsTeach, produced by the National Archives Foundation, provides teachers with a free platform on which they can create online history lessons based on images, documents, audio recording, video recordings, and maps. The lessons that teachers create can be shared with their students through a free DocsTeach online classroom environment.

DocsTeach recently added a new document analysis template for teachers to use to create activities for their students. The document analysis template has teachers choose a document or portion of a document for students to analyze. Teachers can then choose from a menu of pre-made document analysis questions for their students to answer while reviewing a document. Teachers can also create their own questions to add to the analysis activity. After completing the activity set-up it is ready to be shared with students. When students complete the activity online, the teacher can view all of the responses online.

DocsTeach will let you publish your activities to be shared with other teachers. Activities that you publish will appear in the public catalog of activities. That catalog can be searched according to topic, era, activity type, skill, and grade level.

Applications for Education
DocsTeach's new document analysis activity template could provide you with a great way to guide students through difficult primary source documents. I've always found that even the best readers in my classroom need some help when it comes to analyzing primary sources that are more than 100 years old.

DocsTeach now offers thirteen activity templates for teachers to use in building lessons based on the thousands of artifacts available through the DocsTeach website.