Thursday, September 06, 2012

Bugs

Creative Commons by Jessica Lucia via nextdoornature.org
Insects is such a formal word, and it's like "ewww, insects". Bugs is the real thing, check it out, "ewwww, buuuugs!" :)
So, it looks like the second grade curriculum deals with bugs and butterflies in particular. I have researched the subject a little bit and it turns out that bugs still outnumber us as species by far. Which is probably a good thing. There is about several million individual bugs per individual person. If anyone had the ideas that we were ruling the world, the truth is nah-huh. We don't. They do. As they have for the last umpteen million years. (30,000,000 maybe?)
Here are some interesting, good and not so good webquests on the subject:
http://delicious.com/laplao/insects 

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

I am planning to resume this blog, at least for the near future (and will write this time as much as I can before the battery runs out on this laptop).
Today I have been looking at resources to use in the elementary classrooms, to get kids used to the logging procedures, and getting them started on things. The feeling is that they have already tried it all one way or another at home, or outside of school (at a friend's house, in the library), but most likely they have had a different set of procedures and tasks to perform (mom logged in, child went to yahoo! Kids Games, or something like that).
While I was scouting the web, I came upon a couple of promising sites (for all I know, if they can focus long enough, they could be doing Khan Academy, although I would rather have them do MathPickle).
One interesting site was this: http://www.artsconnected.org/toolkit/index.html