Good Morning and Hello Story Starter
Fresh out of the shower this fine morning, I sat down to check my Google Reader updates. However, before I could started reading, there on my Google homepage slid in nicely in the National Geographic POD slop was this fantastic image. Aahh, I am in the midst of planning my first I-will-actually-teach-it-ELA-unit. With The Mysteries of Harris Burdick on my brain, and the joy of my second unit lurking in there too – Mysteries (rethinking it all, the funny side) – I can’t help but think, “Hey hey, lookie here, what a great story starter!”
1 of 6. Dear Fin, I know it’s been ages since we’ve spoken. I have ever so much to share. I know my behaviour was slightly rash the last time we saw each other, especially taking all 11 lemons, the talc and the tractor, but at least the talc has come in handy. It holds nylon really well. Oh, btw …
Great idea. With the advent of flickr and creative commons, there should be no shortage of visual potential for engaging our students.
Hey Dean, Ya, I’m excited about the wealth of visual resources. I keep thinking back to my elementary school days when my class was instructed to perched around the only very large pine-tree on school property. Our task: to learn to sketch a tree. I think of all the tree potential I can offer my kids today. Ya, and I know, nothing can take away from touching, smelling, feeling and listening to a tree. However, I keep thinking of the many jumping-off-tree-points places like flickr offer my students: here is a study of trees by Piet Mondrian, here is a tree as fractal, and here is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, devoid of tree. Oh the access to images, and the speed with which we can jump from idea to idea, allows us all to engage more meaningfully and with greater freedom with our ideas.
And you know, what I like best about the access to all these creative commons images is that I can be engaged with content that is meaningful to me, wow, and so can my students! Nothing against that pine tree from 25 years ago but, what I adored most were those spacious concrete ledges on which we were allowed to perch to do our sketching… now, those ledges had a story, those ledges had potential.