Last weekend, I went to a three-day scrapbooking retreat with Lynn, the managing editor of The Mailbox magazine Kindergarten edition. Around six years ago, we discovered that we were both into paper crafts. Ever since, we’ve been piling ridiculous amounts of crafting stuff in either her car or my car and going to various…
colleagues
Going to the Gallows! Yippee!
My previous post was about one kind of humor—the lighthearted humor or inside jokes you can use in an established classroom setting to get students feeling comfortable and open to new ideas and new learning. Today’s post is about another kind of humor—gallows humor. The definition of gallows humor from Merriam-Webster online is “humor that…
Curing the Winter Blues
I’m not ready to throw in the towel on my previous post, What Traits Must a Teacher Have? If you haven’t left a comment with your ideas, please click on the link and leave your input. In a few more days, I’m going to round up everyone’s ideas and report on what we’ve got. Meanwhile,…
A Turkey-Themed Twofer
Over at our Be The Difference blog, my colleague Diane is running her Gobble, Gobble Giveaway—contribute an idea that saves time during the school day and be entered for a chance to win a book of your choice from The Mailbox. Before you go rushing over to Diane’s blog (and I encourage you to do…
Style: We All Have It
What do you have in common with Philippe Petit? Well, first you have to know who he is, I suppose. Philippe Petit is the famous French high-wire artist who, on August 4, 1974, famously walked 200 feet between the two buildings of the World Trade Center on a 55-pound rope strung 1,368 feet above the…
Plot Points
Before the end of the school year sneaks up on you and wallops you upside the back of the head, stop right now and think about some of the lessons you’ve learned this year. If you haven’t noted the people you want to thank, the compliments you’ve wanted to give, or the ideas you’ve had…
You Can’t Get No Satisfaction?
So the big news last week was not that I had somehow convinced myself to volunteer to be assistant coach on one of my sons’ little league teams. As unexpected as that was—and, believe me, it was about as expected as the announcement that The Mailbox has hired an Elvis impersonator to edit the magazine—the…
Where Never Is Heard a Discouraging Word
Not only is the school year already a long one, filled with ups and downs, but this year you got to linger a day longer in February. At times, it can feel like the year is rocketing past you at an alarming rate and it’ll be a challenge to bring all the fun, creative lessons…
The Unknown Future of Hand-Generated Communication
My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. Monday, January 23, 2012, was the date and Washington, DC, was the place where I was supposed to be. Clearly. Yet my invitation to the conference Handwriting in the 21st Century? An Educational Summit never arrived. Clearly an oversight I do not expect to see happen…
Clinging to the Lost Art?
While I was getting all misty-eyed about my years at Chapman Elementary School the other day, I stumbled across another interesting piece of debris in the jumbled, cobwebbed recesses of my memory. Sentence diagrams. There were a few diagrammed sentences sticking out of the boxes where my fourth and fifth grade remembrances are kept. Those…