Wednesday, September 26, 2012

FREE National Park Entrace Day

September 29
National Public Lands Day

FREE Fee Day!

Our closest park is the Vicksburg National Military Park.
Guided tours are available and reservations are recommended. The park commemorates the campaign, siege, and defense of Vicksburg in 1863 and includes over 1,340 monuments and markers, a 16-mile tour road, a restored Union gunboat, and a National Cemetery. CD’s are available at the Visitors Center, where life-sized exhibits and artifacts from the Siege of Vicksburg are on display. 
Hours: Visitor Center: 8 a.m.-5 p.m.


3201 Clay Street
Vicksburg, MS 39183
601-636-0583
www.nps.gov/vick

Monday, September 24, 2012

Do You Twitter?

Do you Twitter?  It is more than just a social network.  It is a great educational tool as well.   Here are some great educational hashtags that you should check out on Twitter.



#gifted or #gtchat
These two are specifically for parents of gifted and talented children. 

#collegechat
Looking forward to college or have a child in college... this chat hashtag has great information.

#edu or #education
Anything and everything about education falls under these two hashtags.

#edtech
Education Technology

#homeschool, #homeschoolers, #homeschooling
There are a lot of amazing resources for homeschoolers on Twitter!


#scholarship
A huge collection of scholarships and scholarship resources.

#collegeaffordability
Find ways to make college more affordable.

#ACT or #SAT
Get great advice for ACT and SAT prep from these hashtags.




#mathchat - mathematics

#scichat - science

#engchat - English

#artsed - arts in education

#musedchat - music

#SSChat - social studies chat

#GeographyTeacher - Geography

#PhysicsEd - Physics

#SocialStudies - Social Studies

Friday, September 21, 2012

Ninjawords



Sometimes you need to know the definition of a word... fast... like a ninja.  Nothing more and nothing less!




Thursday, September 20, 2012

Roadside America




Where’s the birthplace of Kool-Aid? Where's the “Ax Murder House?” And what’s so mysterious about the Mystery Spot, anyway? Roadside America is your definitive resource for the kooky, nichey, and downright bizarre landmarks that help make this huge country so unique. Use this site to plan your next roadtrip and getting from here to there will be more interesting than your average game of “I Spy.”



You can also add some of your favorite places that YOU have visited!

I searched Mississippi to see the things the suggested...

Vacation Favorites

Notable places we've visited or heard about.



Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Interactive Spelling Bee

Interactive Spelling Bee

This set of activities is like an old-fashioned Spelling Bee.

Contestants -- that's you! -- in grades 1-8 will listen to three stories, one at a time, and then spell words from each story. Students in high school will listen to separate sentences and then spell the words from each sentence.

If you get stumped, you can click to hear a word again, as many times as you need to. If you're in grade three or higher, you can ask for a definition too. Since words often make more sense when they are attached to an idea, all the words in the story or sentences are in context.

Review the words, hear the audio, and SPELL the missing words. Make sure to check your SPELLING carefully, since your results will be calculated at the end.

Depending on the speed of your computer and internet connection, you may experience brief delays.


Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Look and Learn with Hoot

Look and Learn with Hoot
Friday, September 21, 2012Mississippi Museum of Art
10:30 AM



The Mississippi Museum of Art hosts an event for 4-5 year olds and their parents. This educational opportunity features a hands-on art activity and story time. Please dress for mess. This month’s story is Art Dog by Thacher Hurd. 45-minute program.

Arthur Dog is employed as a guard at the Dogopolis Museum of Art.  The museum houses the works of such painters as, “Vincent Van Dog, Pablo Poodle, Henri Muttisse and Leonardo Dog Vinci.”    


Arthur is  mild-mannered and lives a quiet life, except when the moon is full.  During those nights, Arthur’s appearance and personality change.  Donning a mask and a beret and carrying a box containing paints and brushes, he creeps throughout the city as a graffiti artist.  With a splat of his tail, Arthur signs his murals, “Art Dog.” 
One day, a robbery occurs at the Dogopolis Museum.  The Mona Woofa, a priceless painting, is stolen. When the police arrive, they conduct a search of the outside perimeter.  It is a full moon, and Art Dog is found in the alley with his eyes glowing and fur glistening, paintbrush in paw. Unsurprisingly, he is suspected of committing the robbery and is arrested. 

Jail, however, cannot hold the innocent Art Dog; he uses his paint brush to paint an open window where there are bars. He leaps out.

Now free, Art Dog needs transportation. He paints a “Brushmobile” which runs on paint instead of gas. 


Using his keen canine sense of smell, he searches for and locates the real culprits at an abandoned warehouse.  A scuffle occurs, but instead of using a weapon, Art Dog brandishes his paintbrush. “Paint! En garde! Touche!”  When the fighting ceases, the criminals are shown embedded in a piece of art.  

The police arrive, accompanied by the museum director.  The museum director, impressed with Art Dog’s  “Messterpiece”,  offers him a show at the Dogopolis Museum.  On the day of his show, Art Dog paints a masterpiece in the sky titled “City Rhapsody.”  Everyone in attendance is awed, but then suddenly Art Dog is gone leaving everyone, except the reader, wondering, “who was Art Dog?”

Book Review: Outside Your Window: A First Book of Nature


Outside your Window: A First Book of Nature

Written by Nicola Davies and Illustrated by Mark Hearld
Published by Candlewick Press in 2012, ISBN 978-0-7636-5549-5
Grades PreK – 6

Book Review

Whether you live in a rural, suburban, or urban setting, there’s a wondrous world of nature right “outside your window.”  Biologist and author Nicola Davies invites you to explore this world year round with her seasonally organized collection of nature poems. Davies’s exceptional ability to use descriptive and figurative language, in particular similes and metaphors, makes the content come alive and the science facts and concepts more comprehensible to her child audience. Her writing is both beautiful and functional. The poems in various forms explore the cycles, patterns, and sensory experiences of flora and fauna in each season, such as this description of an apple:  “Fresh from the tree, / the apple sits in your hand, / cool and round, / and streaked with sunset colors.” The beauty in this collection is not limited to Davies's words. Mark Hearld’s illustrations rendered in mixed media more than live up to the publisher’s description as “breathtaking.” Reminiscent stylistically of late nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s book illustrations, the images blend collage, woodblock print, pen and ink, and painting, creating rich pastoral scenes that beg multiple viewings.  With its oversized trim, thick pages, fascinating images, and engaging text, this book makes the impossible possible – Davies and Hearld allow us to hold the miraculous natural world around us in the palm of our hands.

Curriculum Ideas

Shared Reading.
Keep this wonderful volume close at hand to read these poems aloud throughout the school year. Select children’s favorites to rewrite on sentence strips to post in a pocket chart. Keep the lines of the poem whole on the sentence strips or cut them into individual word cards so that students can reassemble the poem from memory using letter/sound or sight word cues. Invite children to illustrate the poems.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Symphony at Sunset

Symphony at Sunset

DATE: 9/21/2012
TIME: 6:00 PM
CITY: Jackson, MS
LOCATION: The Cedars, 4145 Old Canton Road 

The Fondren Renaissance Foundation hosts an evening of music from the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra. Bring blankets, lawn chairs and picnic baskets. Free. For more information, call 601-981-9606.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Book Report Forms


Book Report Forms



This is an entire page of book report forms.   Biography, fairy tale, historical, fiction, mystery, non-fiction, surveys... there is something for your student.




Thursday, September 13, 2012

BibMe


bibme

Where was this when we were in high school?   BibMe is a website which takes all of your sources for a paper and creates a bibliography for you.    BibMe is an automated citation creator and bibliography generator. It can save you loads of time building and formatting your references, time that is understandably valuable and would be better served working on your paper.


BibMe allows you to search for books, websites, films, magazines, journals and newspapers from a database of millions of entries to find your source and autofill in the information. BibMe also allows manual entry where you enter all the necessary information yourself instead of choosing from BibMe.




BibMe offers resources to help you cite your work properly in the “Citation Guide” section. You can find information on the different formats for references your sources, using MLA, APA, and Chicago.

bibme02

To create a bibliography, you’ll need to register for the service, you can save up to 10 bibliographies to your account for future use. Once you have saved a bibliography to your account, you can open it up at a later time to edit by clicking “Open”. The bibliography you open will replace your current bibliography in the “My Bibliography” pane. Or if you would like, you can permanently delete a bibliography by clicking “Delete.” You can also download your bibliography in either the MLA, APA, or Chicago formats and include it in your paper.

BibMe is a great service for free, visit http://bibme.org/ and try it for yourself.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Crytoquote






Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to uncover the mystery quotation by cracking the secret code. The quote has been encoded using single letter substitution - this means that each letter of the alphabet has been replaced by a different letter or a number. For examples and more information on how to crack these sorts of codes, click on 'INSTRUCTIONS' while playing the game.

Each week, all the encoded quotes will be from a single author or work. Type who or what you think that author or work is in the input box above for a place on the weekly chart.



Monday, September 10, 2012

Visual Dictionary Online


 
I have a visual learner.    I can explain it all day, but until he sees what I am talking about he just can't understand.    My son is blessed with my Daddy's photographic memory.    When he sees things and reads them, he remembers them.   What a gift!   It is one that I did not receive.   










We love their games of the week.    Play by associating words with images. It’s a great way to build your vocabulary or test your knowledge.  Here is an example of a recent game:


Friday, September 7, 2012

Poetry 180



Poetry 180 is designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year.  Each poem was selected with high school students in mind.   Mr. Billy Collins, developer of Poetry 180 says, "The point is to expose students to some of the fresh voices in contemporary poetry; it is not necessary that all schools read the same poem every day. Also, you may skip a poem for any reason. The poems have been chosen with high school age students in mind, but if you feel a certain poem is inappropriate, skip it."

You can subscribe to Poetry 180 and have it sent to your email daily.  


We chose day 25 as a sample for you:
 

Domestic Work, 1937

Natasha Trethewey

All week she's cleaned
someone else's house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she'd pull
the lid to--that look saying
Let's make a change, girl.
But Sunday mornings are hers--
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.
Cleanliness is next to godliness ...
Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.
Nearer my God to Thee ...
She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better.

from Domestic Work, 1999
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Acrostic Poetry



In this online tool, students can learn about and write acrostic poems. An acrostic poem uses the letters in a word to begin each line of the poem. All lines of the poem relate to or describe the main topic word. As part of the online tool, students brainstorm words to help write their poems and can save their work-in-progress to revise and edit, reinforcing elements of the writing process. Students can also print their finished acrostic poems or proudly show off their work by e-mailing it to a friend.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln, Grant and Mississippi

The Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln, Grant, and Mississippi


DATE: 9/11/2012 
TIME: 12:00 PM
CITY: Jackson, MS  
PHONE: 601.576.6920

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Dr. Edna Greene Medford from Howard University will offer remarks on this monumental event in American history. Lecture to be followed by panel discussion and light reception. This free event is funded by the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Foundation. Free.




Directions


Cars

  • Take the Pearl St. exit (96A) off I-55.
  • Turn right onto State St.
  • Turn right onto Amite St.
  • Turn right into parking lot behind Old Capitol
  • Walk around south side of building to enter through the front

Buses

  • Park along Amite Street, next to War Memorial Building
  • Visitors walk along sidewalk to the front of the building

Monday, September 3, 2012

Book Review: Georgia in Hawaii: When Georgia O'Keefe Painted What She Pleased

Georgia in Hawaii: When Georgia O’Keeffe Painted What She Pleased

Written by Amy Novesky and Illustrated by Yuyi Morales
Published by Harcourt in 2012, ISBN 978-0-15-205420-5
Grades 1 – 6

Book Review
Georgia painted waterfalls and green pleated mountains, lava hardened into fantastic shapes, and delicate, feathered fishhooks that she collected like seashells.” 
But she did not paint a pineapple. A new picture book biography of Georgia O’Keeffe by Amy Novesky captures the passion, intensity and determination of the iconic American artist by focusing on a lesser-known event in her life. In February of 1939 Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to Hawaii, having been commissioned by the Dole Pineapple company to “create two paintings to promote the delights of pineapple juice.” Conflict arose when O’Keefe was told by company owners that she could not be housed next to the pineapple fields. Denied the opportunity to paint pineapples in their natural environment, the artist refused to paint one. Instead, she traveled throughout Hawaii, immersing herself in the natural wonders of the island and creating twenty paintings. Novesky’s concise, yet expressive, text evokes a vivid portrait of the artist, her strength of character, her passion for beauty, and ultimately, her rationality. Yuyi Morales’s digitally compiled acrylic paintings capture the lushness of the Hawaii and pay tribute to O’Keeffe’s artistic style. Double page spreads immerse the reader in luminous landscapes saturated with vivid color. One spread forefronts a canvas with an image of the same seashore that serves as background, while O’Keefe is pictured off to the side, gathering treasures at the shoreline. The turquoise endpapers include captioned images of the native flowers that appear in Georgia’s paintings. A powerful tribute to the artistic spirit, this title will forever change the way you view a pineapple.