This coming Tuesday, November 1st at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT Rushton Hurley and I will be hosting the second episode of our third season of Two EdTech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff. Just like the title says we take questions, answer questions, and share some cool stuff that we've found around the web. We'd love to have you join us for this fun and free half-hour webinar. You can register here to join us live.
If you have a question for us, send it to me at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or just join us live and drop your question into the chat. And to see what our little webinars are all about, watch the recording of the October episode of season three.
One of the things that people sometimes find surprising about me is that I enjoy listening to and watching old Grateful Dead shows. One of my all-time favorites is this October 31, 1980 performance of Ripple. I was watching it for about the hundredth time last week when I was struck by the images that appear from about the 1:26 mark to the 1:36 mark. In that frame we see a young couple (I'd guess their age to be mid-20's) swaying with their arms around each other. I began to wonder about them. My wondering thoughts could be the beginning of a few writing prompts.
Here's what I wondered about that couple:
Did they meet that night?
What were they thinking about each other?
Did they continue to follow the Dead?
Did they grow up together, get married, and have kids?
If they had kids, did they take them to any Grateful Dead shows?
Are they still alive?
Were they as happy as I think they are in that scene?
Of course, you can play this "what if? what happened?" game with any picture or video clip of a couple of people. I just chose this one because it stands out to me and it gave me an excuse to write about one of my favorite Grateful songs.
As my daughters have reminded me about 1,000 times in the last week, tomorrow is Halloween. If you have elementary school students who are equally excited about Halloween and you want to include a little Halloween-themed activity into your day tomorrow, take a look through this round-up of resources that I've previously shared throughout the month.
How to Catch Monsters is a free play script published by Playbooks Reader's Theater. The play was written to be performed by students in first through third grade. The play centers around two children who are trying to catch blue, green, and purple monsters. The children do get a little help from their work-from-home dad. In all there are six roles for students to play. There is also a narrator role for a teacher to play in How to Catch Monsters. The How to Catch Monsters script is color coded to make it a little easier for students to follow. The script also includes some cues and other notes to help students perform the play.
Playing Kahoot games is a fun way to review almost anything including Halloween safety. That's why a few years ago I made the following video to demonstrate how to find and modify Halloween safety games in Kahoot.
OPEN Phys Ed has a collection of more than a dozen Halloween-themed lesson plans for physical education classes. The collection is titled Pumpkin Patch Games and you can access all of them as PDFs and or Word files. Like all of the OPEN Phys Ed resources that I've reviewed over the last few years, the Pumpkin Patch Games are designed to be as inclusive as possible. The games aren't your "traditional" ball-sports type of games that make some kids loathe physical education classes. A few of the games students might enjoy include Silly Spooky Storytime (my older daughter would love that one), Monster Mash, and Pickles in the Pumpkin Patch. In addition to directions for each of the dozen+ games in Pumpkin Patch Games, OPEN provides music playlists that you might want to use while kids are playing the various games in your gym.
ReadWorks offers a collection of Halloween-themed articles for a K-8 audience and a few for 9-12. The articles covered topics like the history of Halloween, pumpkin farms, and the history of ghost stories. Like all ReadWorks articles, you'll find comprehension questions and vocabulary sets to accompany the articles. A read aloud feature is also available in ReadWorks.
SciShow Kids has a playlist of videos covering topics that are frequently connected to symbols of Halloween. Those topics are bats, spiders, skeletons, and the changing colors of leaves. In the video about bats students learn how bats use sound to find their way at night, how and why bats hang upside down, and how they rear their offspring. In the video on spiders students learn about the role of spiders in controlling flying insect populations and how spiders create webs. In the video about the human skeleton students can learn about the functions of the skeleton as well as how bones grow and heal over time. Finally, in the video on leaves students learn about the correlation between chlorophyll, sunlight, and leaf color.
PBS Learning Media has a collection of Halloween-themed lessons for elementary school students. One of the those lessons is all about the historical traditions that contributed to the creation of Halloween. The materials for this lesson include a short video, video discussion questions, and a vocabulary sheet. All of the items in PBS Learning Media's Halloween collection can be shared to Google Classroom where you can add questions for students answer after watching the videos.
Wakelet is a free, collaborative bookmarking and file organization tool that puts things into a nice visual display. So when a former colleague emailed me a couple of days ago to ask for help creating a collection of digital maps Wakelet was one of the first tools to come to mind (Padlet was the other). To a Wakelet collection you can add links (with previews) for Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Street View imagery, and Bing Maps.
Applications for Education
My former colleague who emailed me for help (and inspired this blog post) was looking for a way to create a collection of maps views of landmarks related to the American Revolution. He wanted his students to simply click and be taken to the exact view that he had selected. You could do the exact same thing or make your Wakelet collection collaborative to allow students to add map links to places that they investigated on their own.
Good morning from Maine where the sunrise is still more than an hour away as I drink my first cup of coffee. It's going to be an exciting day in our house because we're going to see Disney Frozen on Ice! To say that my daughters are excited about it would be an understatement. They would have slept in their Frozen costumes last night if we had let them. The rest of the weekend will be a more mundane schedule of raking leaves and riding bikes. I hope that you have a fun and relaxing weekend.
This week more people registered for Animated Explanations which begins on November 1st. Register by midnight (ET) on October 31st to be a part of the inaugural class!
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This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
