Kids Aspire to Fame - Article Review

Just read a great article by greatschools.org, one of my favorite sources of education news. This article discusses kids' aspiration to fame as a career field, like the Kardashians, or the Hiltons.

 I'm really glad someone brought this up. I remember when we first started hearing about Paris Hilton and her family on TV. It seemed normal to others that she was in the media's spotlight, but I remember feeling a little ... irritated when I would see her on TV. Why in the world were we watching her? She couldn't act, sing, play sports, dance, etc ... She was the daughter of a powerful and wealthy individual and for that, she enjoyed the attention of voyeuristic America, setting into spin a wheel that continues to spin, sucking us all in to its seemingly irresistible vortex.

How do we, as educators and parents, resist? This article mentions that kids who aspired to help others still spent time on social media, took and tagged pictures of themselves and their friends, met new people online.

Are we setting the example? Spending free time enjoying a good book, taking a walk, helping a friend or stranger? It takes work to fight against the forces of technology, an ever-increasing presence in our lives, full of really cool, intriguing, engaging applications, many of which are designed to propel us in to the public's eye. How can we use technology to expand our mind and our intelligence, not our image?

While my own sharing of this article almost negates my message, I'll be thinking about this challenge this week. I know I don't aspire to "be" famous, but what ways can I influence children to want to help others, and perhaps use technology to do so? Or perhaps not use it to help others?

Your thoughts? Would love to hear them!

Academic Vocabulary Reviews

I'm really excited! Today I created two new jeopardy games to review the common academic language we need for discussing a multitude of concepts in ELA and Science. I have been meaning to do this FOREVER! I had created one for ELA on poster board two years ago, and just used it for review last week, but it was time to update! I never realized how easy it was to make a jeopardy game. I'll follow this post with a link to instructions for doing so. I don't know, though, I may be the last teacher in the world to have discovered it! Here's my jeopardy game:

ELA Jeopardy Review Game

Here's the one I created for Science. I have to admit, Science is not my forte, but I want something fun to do with the kids since I'm required to teach it in order to get them ready for testing. I know this is VERY basic, but you can use it at the beginning of the year to see what they know, and I'll use it to prepare for testing as a way to blow off some steam, have a little fun, and maybe target those kids who are real low. In any case, my students are bilingual, so having to come up with the word matching the definition without a list of choices, is a good way to work out their brains.

Science Vocabulary Review

I hope these are helpful to you! Make sure you use some incentives and make the competition fun! I'll be adding a review for math very soon!

Here's a link to the instructions for making your own template. Of course you're free to use mine, but I put my title page at the end, because I forgot to add it at the beginning. Once you have all the pages hyperlinked, if you insert a page, it throws all your hyperlinks off! I am excited to add some multimedia features to the next ones I do, but I think these are pretty nifty for my first try!