Why maps are the ultimate graphic design achievements, and how they tell stories
“Paths of Raiders” “Paths of Doom” “Paths of Crusade” “Paths of Hope” “Paths of Empire” “Paths of Return” Andrew DeGraff è un genio. Ha rappresentato le trilogie di Guerre Stellari e di Indiana Jones attraverso delle mappe. Geniale. Stupende. Gallery 1988 Andrew DeGraff via Super Punch
The use of visual images is becoming increasingly popular when conducting research. Visual images which are inclusive of photographs, paintings, drawings and maps can convey a wealth of information…
The American Girl books told the stories of girls throughout American history, exploring different eras through a set of six core titles. View how the stories of Felicity, Josefina, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha and Molly converged and diverged from that pattern in this transit-map-style infographic, where each stop represents a title in the series. Note the transfer stops at Meet, Learns a Lesson, Surprise, etc., while also exploring how mysteries, short stories and other stand-alone books built out the stories of the six original American Girl dolls. Some details I really liked incorporating into the map: • Colors reflect the Pleasant Company's branding for each doll • Circles in the map legend echo the circular silhouettes used on the back cover of the classic books • Stops (titles) are ordered according to the stories' timelines About the poster: • 20" wide by 16" tall • Paper thickness: 10.3 mil • Paper weight: 5.57 oz/y² (189 g/m²) • Giclée printing quality • Opacity: 94% • ISO brightness: 104%
Aboriginal society has preserved memories of Australia’s coastline dating back more than 7,000 years. That’s the conclusion that University of the Sunshine Coast Professor of Geography Patrick Nunn...
Does the ancient Hebrew Zodiac tell the story of God's plan for mankind's redemption? Does the Mazzaroth foretell the Gospel?
Cindy West has put together a HUGE list of geography living literature for your books around the world reading pleasure.
RICH ROMAN HISTORY This is a rich history of the Roman Empire told in a style that makes the book not only a resource for teachers and homeschool parents, but also a reader for sixth graders and older. In fact, this book was originally written as a reader for 6th graders who are entering a phase of inner skepticism and burgeoning personalities. Roman history is a more focused and serious study than the mythology of 4th and 5th grades, much like a sixth grader's year of change. Generously illustrated with paintings by masters and maps depicting the era of Roman rule, the stories of the founding, the seven kings, the imperialism, the caesars, and the decline of Rome ring through these pages of the long-reigning Roman Empire. Master storyteller and author, Dorothy Harrer, describes with enlivening detail the rise and fall of this remarkable chapter in the history of Western Civilization. For Roman scholars right down to an enthusiastic student this is a book not to miss. DETAILS Roman Lives Written by Dorothy Harrer, Professional Educator. Published by Waldorf Publications, January 15, 2016. Age: 11+ years Class 6/6th Grade 0.33" x 10.0" x 7.01“ (0.7lbs) 126 pages Softcover
Satellite view of Detroit and Windsor, showing Lake Erie (bottom) and Lake St. Clair Detroit’s street map has often been described as a palimpsest. I’ve called it the broken hub of a wheel dumped beside the river (which isn’t really a river; it’s a strait), but my metaphor actually leaves out most of the streets. How the map came to look as it does today is a story of…well, palimpsest, really: the occasional plan, destruction, expediency, and economic interests. (Neglect and decay affect the look of the map on Google Street View, but so far don’t seem to play a huge role in altering the map itself.) Detroit lies on the northern side of the Detroit River, a strait (in French, un détroit) running between Lake Erie (a Great Lake) and Lake St. Clair (a Still-Decent Lake). It’s the only city in the US where you head south to get to Canada. That means that Canada is beneath us. On a map, anyway. Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was founded in 1701 by a rather colorful character, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, whose achievements also include (in no particular order) inventing a fake noble lineage (the “de la Mothe Cadillac part)—complete with a fake family crest, a simplification of which you can see today on the Cadillac next to you in the parking lot; losing his entire fortune (reputedly by ignoring a fortune teller’s admonition to not do anything foolish like poke the Nain Rouge with a stick); and moving to Detroit’s younger, more popular sister, New Orleans. Couldn’t stay put, that Antoine. Physical and social mobility, and reinventing yourself were things you could do quite easily in the “New World” where no one knew you. They became popular hobbies in Detroit, where people came for opportunity and left when it dried up, often reinventing themselves in the process. A statue of Cadillac in Hart Plaza. On the right, he stakes his claim on a Lexus. I took these photos in 2008, I'm not too proud to admit.. The city’s original white settlers brought with them from their native Normandy a method of divvying up the land they stole from Detroit’s native Wyandots and Hurons. That method was to lay out “ribbon farms”: very thin, long strips of land that gave each farmer his own access to the river (which isn’t really a river; it’s a strait). The oldest roads in Detroit mostly reflect the locations of the ribbon farms and/or are named for their owners. That’s why so many of Detroit’s streets have funny French spellings, despite no one pronouncing them in French anymore. Ribbon farms: Notice they did the same thing on the other side of the river, too. Fast forward about a century, and in 1805, Detroit stakes its claim as a city by doing what all cities do at some point in their history: burning to the ground. (Just ask Chicago. Or San Francisco. Or London. It’s a cliché, really.) Two major Detroit tropes occur with that fire: (1) the Nain Rouge is seen dancing in the flames, the bastard; and (2) Father Gabriel Richard, co-founder of the Catholepistemiad (later sensibly re-named the University of Michigan) and priest at Ste. Anne de Détroit Church, said something along the lines of “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus,” which, being translated, means, “We hope for better; it will rise from the ashes.” Whatever language he actually said it in, it was such a great line it was eventually made into the city’s motto, and has been kept ever-relevant by generation after generation of Detroit pyromaniacs (the bastards). Detroit city flag, incorporating the motto and the 1805 fire, as well as the three national flags that have flown over the city. In 1806, Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory Augustus Woodward produced a plan for rebuilding the city. He laid out broad avenues in interlocking hexagonal patterns with parks or plazas at the intersection points. The plan was supposed to have been expandable with the city’s future growth: just add more hexagons! (W. HawkinsFerry calls the plan “so French in its geometric precision.”) Woodward’s plan inscribed a new pattern over the surviving traces of the old ribbon farms. Residents hated it at the time, because they no longer recognized their hometown. The Woodward Plan. Grand Circus Park makes more sense now, doesn't it? Someone drew up this image of what the interlocking hexagons would have looked like, had Woodward's plan been expanded. Woodward’s plan was never expanded, though, despite the city’s growth. Through the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was taking place throughout the U.S., and Detroit was no exception. Thanks to its location in the Great Lakes system, Detroit became known for ship building, making stoves, and doing all manner of things that involved bending or shaping metal. (That eventually proved useful when the automobile came along.) As the city expanded, thanks to industry, it did so according to the demands of economic interests. Detroit was not alone in this. There was a growing sense throughout the U.S. that its booming industrial cities were dirty and unpleasant, organized as they were around industry rather than civic life. In Detroit, for example, the river front was crowded with shipping yards, with no public recreational access to the river. In the 19th century, most U.S. architects trained only by apprenticeship. The few that did pursue academic study had to go to Europe to do so. Even then, most of them didn’t bother to finish their programs; a diploma was simply not necessary to their practice back home. The fashionable place to study was the Écoledes Beaux-Arts in Paris, which urged a return to classical architecture, and other things you can read about on Wikipedia. But something happened at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The fair’s Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham saw an opportunity to showcase his ideas about making Chicago the sort of place people might want to live in, so that the Midwest’s nouveau-riche might settle there (i.e., spend their money there) rather than just pass through on business trips. So he assembled a team of artists, architects, and landscape artists and had them apply the Beaux-Arts aesthetic and ideals to the fair’s site on Chicago’s lakefront. With this project, Chicago’s lakefront was beautified and reclaimed, Chicago’s reputation for its architecture began, and the City Beautiful movement spread like a cliché through the nation (but one that renewed rather than destroying cities). The Beaux-Arts style prefers to give its buildings and statues a great deal of "look space." Today you can drive (or ride a train) from Chicago to Detroit in about 5 hours. Apparently it took the City Beautiful movement nearly two decades to make the trip around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, Detroit’s mayor, Philip Breitmeyer, founded a City Plan Commission, which immediately set about bringing Daniel H. Burnham and his similarly-middle-initialed associate, Edward H. Bennett, to Detroit to do some much-neglected city planning. Nothing much had been done since the Woodward plan (which was designed for a population of 50,000; Detroit had reached 700,000 by the time of the Burnham and Bennett plan) other than Michigan Governor Lewis Cass’ 1830 development of old “Indian trails” into military roads radiating out, outstate even, from the city’s center: Fort Street, Michigan Avenue, Grand River Avenue, Woodward Avenue, and Gratiot Avenue. (Poor Fort Street, only a street…) I can't find any images of the Burnham street plan, so instead, enjoy this photo of Daniel Burnham, left, and Lewis Cass, right. Burnham's eyes look so sincere, but surely he's hiding something under that moustache. Cass is either reaching for his wallet or having chest pains. The Burnham plan, completed in 1915, emphasized parks and public spaces, much as Woodward’s had done. Detroit’s Cultural Center, which boasts the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wayne State University, the Detroit Historical Museum, the Charles H. Wright African American Museum, the main branch of the Public Library, and the Detroit Science Center (and the Cathedral Church of St. Paul) is credited to the Burnham plan. Not much of his plan actually was implemented, though. For example, Burnham planned two major avenues radiating river-ward from the Cultural Center: one leading to Belle Isle, and the other to the then-new Michigan Central Station (completed in 1913, abandoned in 1988, and currently being stabilized, finally). I took this photo in October, 2012, on the way into Mercury Burger and Bar. They have great French fries, and, I have it on good authority, quite tasty poutine as well. (I'm a vegetarian, so I wouldn't know.) By the early 20th century, Detroit had an extensive and efficient streetcar (trolley) system—at its peak, in some locations, streetcars arrived every sixty seconds! But with the popularity of the automobile and the even greater popularity of moving to the suburbs, the streetcar system fell into disuse and was closed in 1956. It is rumored the streetcars still operate in Mexico City, which purchased them from Detroit. (No, San Francisco, which has the hobby of collecting other cities’ steetcars, doesn’t have them.) >sigh< Also with the rise of the auto industry, the need for efficient freight transit into, out of , and across the city led to freeway building. As with many other projects, from the Michigan Central Station to general “slum-clearing” (read: corralling non-white people and poor white people to less desirable locations), the freeways saw the city exercise “eminent domain,” condemning buildings and displacing many people from their homes, and disrupting or effacing historic neighborhoods. I-75 famously had to go right where Paradise Valley, the Black cultural center of the city, was, destroying world-famous jazz and blues clubs among other important sites. Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, was widely razed for the Michigan Central Station and its Beaux-Arts requisite of a really big park in front of it to set it off. Freeways also disrupted Corktown and neighboring Mexicantown, the latter of which has also had to put up with the AmbassadorBridge dumping ¼ of the commercial traffic between the U.S. and Canada right into its residential areas. But thankfully, both neighborhoods are seeing renewal in recent years. Children enjoying the fountain by the Ren Cen on the Riverfront on a hot and muggy summer day, 2008. So, as with any city, the street map will continue to change, as will the landmarks and features on that map. Happily, in recent years, the riverfront has been transformed into delightful public space, where children play in fountains or ride the carousel, and people of all ages bike, walk, take lunch breaks, just hang out, or even fish in the Detroit River. All while looking down on Canada. We're watching you, Windsor. (Actually, I have nothing at all against Canada. Vive la Windsor!) Sources for this post include: Having lived in Detroit Ferry, W. Hawkins. The Buildings of Detroit: A History. Revised ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968; 1980. Historic Detroit Herron, Jerry. AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Glazer, Sidney. Detroit: A Study in Urban Development. New York: Bookman Associates, 1965. and various websites, newspaper articles, and other sources absorbed over the years - especially regarding the city's early history. Ferry, Hawkins. The Buildings of Detroit: A History. Revised ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968; 1980. I've linked to wikipedia often here for convenience. The interested reader is welcome to google other sources.
Explore sunni.brightspot.brown's 4051 photos on Flickr!
The world was a scary place in the Middle Ages.
PPT VERSION ADDED AND RECENTLY UPDATED: MAY 2017!!!! This BEST SELLING lesson is NOW AVAILABLE IN PPT FORM and is appropriate for grades 2nd - 5th grade. Students will explore and discover the musical tale of Peter and the Wolf by listening to and identifying the musical themes for each character and their assigned instrument. Included in this lesson are audio sound files for character instrument themes, various video attachments, listening map, and MUCH, MUCH more!! There are several games and higher level thinking activities to test the students' comprehension of the unit. Students will be expected to identify and label each character's instruments and themes, cause and effect relationships, sequence of events, etc. This lesson is also available in SMART NOTEBOOK format if you have access to a SMART BOARD and the software to run it! Click link below to purchase this format if you are interested. If you like this product, you may also like, Peter and the Wolf, A Story Told Through Music: A Unit of Study SMART NOTEBOOK EDITION If you like this product, you may also like, Peter and the Wolf, A Musical Adventure-POWER-POINT Edition If you like this product, you may also like, Peter and the Wolf, A Musical Adventure-SMNTBK Edition If you like this product, you may also like, Peter and the Wolf, A Musical Adventure-PDF Edition If you like this product, you may also like, Peter and the Wolf, Color By Rhythm Notation Activity If you like this product, you may also like, Peter and the Wolf, Color By Dynamics Activity If you like this product, you may also like, Peter and the Wolf, Color By Tempo Activity Come follow and/or subscribe to my blog at.... Mrs. Kuchta's Corner, An Elementary Music Wonderland! Check out and “like” my FACEBOOK page too at… FACEBOOK PAGE - Mrs. Kuchta's Corner Elementary Music Wonderland This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Every story deserves to be told, but not all stories are glamorous, or easy to tell, and so they're not told as often as others. Stories about the wrongs of our society, the injustice, and the underground are exactly that type.
Satellite view of Detroit and Windsor, showing Lake Erie (bottom) and Lake St. Clair Detroit’s street map has often been described as a palimpsest. I’ve called it the broken hub of a wheel dumped beside the river (which isn’t really a river; it’s a strait), but my metaphor actually leaves out most of the streets. How the map came to look as it does today is a story of…well, palimpsest, really: the occasional plan, destruction, expediency, and economic interests. (Neglect and decay affect the look of the map on Google Street View, but so far don’t seem to play a huge role in altering the map itself.) Detroit lies on the northern side of the Detroit River, a strait (in French, un détroit) running between Lake Erie (a Great Lake) and Lake St. Clair (a Still-Decent Lake). It’s the only city in the US where you head south to get to Canada. That means that Canada is beneath us. On a map, anyway. Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was founded in 1701 by a rather colorful character, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, whose achievements also include (in no particular order) inventing a fake noble lineage (the “de la Mothe Cadillac part)—complete with a fake family crest, a simplification of which you can see today on the Cadillac next to you in the parking lot; losing his entire fortune (reputedly by ignoring a fortune teller’s admonition to not do anything foolish like poke the Nain Rouge with a stick); and moving to Detroit’s younger, more popular sister, New Orleans. Couldn’t stay put, that Antoine. Physical and social mobility, and reinventing yourself were things you could do quite easily in the “New World” where no one knew you. They became popular hobbies in Detroit, where people came for opportunity and left when it dried up, often reinventing themselves in the process. A statue of Cadillac in Hart Plaza. On the right, he stakes his claim on a Lexus. I took these photos in 2008, I'm not too proud to admit.. The city’s original white settlers brought with them from their native Normandy a method of divvying up the land they stole from Detroit’s native Wyandots and Hurons. That method was to lay out “ribbon farms”: very thin, long strips of land that gave each farmer his own access to the river (which isn’t really a river; it’s a strait). The oldest roads in Detroit mostly reflect the locations of the ribbon farms and/or are named for their owners. That’s why so many of Detroit’s streets have funny French spellings, despite no one pronouncing them in French anymore. Ribbon farms: Notice they did the same thing on the other side of the river, too. Fast forward about a century, and in 1805, Detroit stakes its claim as a city by doing what all cities do at some point in their history: burning to the ground. (Just ask Chicago. Or San Francisco. Or London. It’s a cliché, really.) Two major Detroit tropes occur with that fire: (1) the Nain Rouge is seen dancing in the flames, the bastard; and (2) Father Gabriel Richard, co-founder of the Catholepistemiad (later sensibly re-named the University of Michigan) and priest at Ste. Anne de Détroit Church, said something along the lines of “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus,” which, being translated, means, “We hope for better; it will rise from the ashes.” Whatever language he actually said it in, it was such a great line it was eventually made into the city’s motto, and has been kept ever-relevant by generation after generation of Detroit pyromaniacs (the bastards). Detroit city flag, incorporating the motto and the 1805 fire, as well as the three national flags that have flown over the city. In 1806, Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory Augustus Woodward produced a plan for rebuilding the city. He laid out broad avenues in interlocking hexagonal patterns with parks or plazas at the intersection points. The plan was supposed to have been expandable with the city’s future growth: just add more hexagons! (W. HawkinsFerry calls the plan “so French in its geometric precision.”) Woodward’s plan inscribed a new pattern over the surviving traces of the old ribbon farms. Residents hated it at the time, because they no longer recognized their hometown. The Woodward Plan. Grand Circus Park makes more sense now, doesn't it? Someone drew up this image of what the interlocking hexagons would have looked like, had Woodward's plan been expanded. Woodward’s plan was never expanded, though, despite the city’s growth. Through the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was taking place throughout the U.S., and Detroit was no exception. Thanks to its location in the Great Lakes system, Detroit became known for ship building, making stoves, and doing all manner of things that involved bending or shaping metal. (That eventually proved useful when the automobile came along.) As the city expanded, thanks to industry, it did so according to the demands of economic interests. Detroit was not alone in this. There was a growing sense throughout the U.S. that its booming industrial cities were dirty and unpleasant, organized as they were around industry rather than civic life. In Detroit, for example, the river front was crowded with shipping yards, with no public recreational access to the river. In the 19th century, most U.S. architects trained only by apprenticeship. The few that did pursue academic study had to go to Europe to do so. Even then, most of them didn’t bother to finish their programs; a diploma was simply not necessary to their practice back home. The fashionable place to study was the Écoledes Beaux-Arts in Paris, which urged a return to classical architecture, and other things you can read about on Wikipedia. But something happened at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The fair’s Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham saw an opportunity to showcase his ideas about making Chicago the sort of place people might want to live in, so that the Midwest’s nouveau-riche might settle there (i.e., spend their money there) rather than just pass through on business trips. So he assembled a team of artists, architects, and landscape artists and had them apply the Beaux-Arts aesthetic and ideals to the fair’s site on Chicago’s lakefront. With this project, Chicago’s lakefront was beautified and reclaimed, Chicago’s reputation for its architecture began, and the City Beautiful movement spread like a cliché through the nation (but one that renewed rather than destroying cities). The Beaux-Arts style prefers to give its buildings and statues a great deal of "look space." Today you can drive (or ride a train) from Chicago to Detroit in about 5 hours. Apparently it took the City Beautiful movement nearly two decades to make the trip around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, Detroit’s mayor, Philip Breitmeyer, founded a City Plan Commission, which immediately set about bringing Daniel H. Burnham and his similarly-middle-initialed associate, Edward H. Bennett, to Detroit to do some much-neglected city planning. Nothing much had been done since the Woodward plan (which was designed for a population of 50,000; Detroit had reached 700,000 by the time of the Burnham and Bennett plan) other than Michigan Governor Lewis Cass’ 1830 development of old “Indian trails” into military roads radiating out, outstate even, from the city’s center: Fort Street, Michigan Avenue, Grand River Avenue, Woodward Avenue, and Gratiot Avenue. (Poor Fort Street, only a street…) I can't find any images of the Burnham street plan, so instead, enjoy this photo of Daniel Burnham, left, and Lewis Cass, right. Burnham's eyes look so sincere, but surely he's hiding something under that moustache. Cass is either reaching for his wallet or having chest pains. The Burnham plan, completed in 1915, emphasized parks and public spaces, much as Woodward’s had done. Detroit’s Cultural Center, which boasts the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wayne State University, the Detroit Historical Museum, the Charles H. Wright African American Museum, the main branch of the Public Library, and the Detroit Science Center (and the Cathedral Church of St. Paul) is credited to the Burnham plan. Not much of his plan actually was implemented, though. For example, Burnham planned two major avenues radiating river-ward from the Cultural Center: one leading to Belle Isle, and the other to the then-new Michigan Central Station (completed in 1913, abandoned in 1988, and currently being stabilized, finally). I took this photo in October, 2012, on the way into Mercury Burger and Bar. They have great French fries, and, I have it on good authority, quite tasty poutine as well. (I'm a vegetarian, so I wouldn't know.) By the early 20th century, Detroit had an extensive and efficient streetcar (trolley) system—at its peak, in some locations, streetcars arrived every sixty seconds! But with the popularity of the automobile and the even greater popularity of moving to the suburbs, the streetcar system fell into disuse and was closed in 1956. It is rumored the streetcars still operate in Mexico City, which purchased them from Detroit. (No, San Francisco, which has the hobby of collecting other cities’ steetcars, doesn’t have them.) >sigh< Also with the rise of the auto industry, the need for efficient freight transit into, out of , and across the city led to freeway building. As with many other projects, from the Michigan Central Station to general “slum-clearing” (read: corralling non-white people and poor white people to less desirable locations), the freeways saw the city exercise “eminent domain,” condemning buildings and displacing many people from their homes, and disrupting or effacing historic neighborhoods. I-75 famously had to go right where Paradise Valley, the Black cultural center of the city, was, destroying world-famous jazz and blues clubs among other important sites. Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, was widely razed for the Michigan Central Station and its Beaux-Arts requisite of a really big park in front of it to set it off. Freeways also disrupted Corktown and neighboring Mexicantown, the latter of which has also had to put up with the AmbassadorBridge dumping ¼ of the commercial traffic between the U.S. and Canada right into its residential areas. But thankfully, both neighborhoods are seeing renewal in recent years. Children enjoying the fountain by the Ren Cen on the Riverfront on a hot and muggy summer day, 2008. So, as with any city, the street map will continue to change, as will the landmarks and features on that map. Happily, in recent years, the riverfront has been transformed into delightful public space, where children play in fountains or ride the carousel, and people of all ages bike, walk, take lunch breaks, just hang out, or even fish in the Detroit River. All while looking down on Canada. We're watching you, Windsor. (Actually, I have nothing at all against Canada. Vive la Windsor!) Sources for this post include: Having lived in Detroit Ferry, W. Hawkins. The Buildings of Detroit: A History. Revised ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968; 1980. Historic Detroit Herron, Jerry. AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Glazer, Sidney. Detroit: A Study in Urban Development. New York: Bookman Associates, 1965. and various websites, newspaper articles, and other sources absorbed over the years - especially regarding the city's early history. Ferry, Hawkins. The Buildings of Detroit: A History. Revised ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968; 1980. I've linked to wikipedia often here for convenience. The interested reader is welcome to google other sources.
Maps do more than help us get around, Simon Garfield makes evident in his tour through the history and science of map-making. They can unlock vast wealth, solve mysteries of science, project political power — even trace the outlines of the divine.
I've been using the Writer's Workshop model of teaching and celebrating writing for the last 8 years, but this is the first year that I feel I've got a good grip on how to help my students organize their Writer's Notebooks (WN). This blog will show you some options for organizing WN's and some sample lessons to help you implement the Writer's Workshop model easily. Please visit my TeachersPayTeachers account to support the work I've done here at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Writers-Notebook-Organization-Writers-Workshop-Starter-Kit For everything I sell on the site, I give 10% to DonorsChoose.org and an additional 10% to Food for the Poor. The complete kit is only $5 for all that you see here, plus Writer's Notebook labels and additional information for everything you need to start your Writer's Workshop off on the "write" foot! Here is the cover of my Writer's Notebook. I usually show my students a few of my WN's that I've used over the years (including one from 2nd grade!). This is my newest one and it's still a work in progress. I encourage them to put anything that is school-appropriate on their WN, including photos, magazine & newspaper clippings, stickers, and words that symbolize who they are. The point of decorating it is to have more ownership in their writing/WN and to garner ideas for their writing based off of what they included on the covers of their WN. My first year I had my students decorate them in class, but I find it to be a huge waste of time when I have SO much else to teach them. After explaining it, I make decorating their personal WN homework for over a weekend. It makes for pretty fun homework! I also decorated the back of my WN. Here is the title page, which is the first blank page in the spiral/composition book: Next comes the dedication page. Again, this brings more purpose to students' writing- they are writing for someone or to someone and get to choose who their audience is. This is the first tab in my WN, but I probably won't have my students tab theirs, simply because they won't use this much after they write it. I made up some little tabs that are easy to print and put them on Teachers Pay Teachers so no one has to write all these by hand or deal with the crazy formatting! I used the little Staples sticky notes that I got 100+ of for a quarter, and then put clear tape over it to help it stick better. Most of my students have their tabs last for the entire year, but a few have to retape theirs. The next tab is for the Table of Contents and it's just one page long. This is a section that students will add to throughout the year, so I like to have it tabbed for easy access. It's organized by the title of the work and the page number, just like a real non-fiction book or chapter book, which helps solidify the text features lessons too! Now for the Writing Ideas tab, which is the next five pages. This is another area where students will be flipping to on a regular basis for ideas on what to write, so a tab makes this search much more efficient. The first ideas for writing activity that I do with my students is their Authority List. I do a quick-write where they finish the sentence, "I know a lot about..." and they jot down as many things as they possibly can. I give them different categories, like sports, animals, colors, friends, activities, places they've been, books they've read, favorite authors, things they do at home, things their family does, what they do on the weekends/summer/mornings/etc. The idea is to get as many things down as quickly as possible so they have a lot of options to write about when they come back to this page throughout the school year. For even more ideas on how to get kids excited about writing and give them a plethora of ideas on it, visit my TPT site! There are four additional pages with pictures and descriptions to help your students have a never-ending supply of things to write about! The next tab is My Writing. This is the largest tab because this is where all the student's fabulous writing will go! Brainstorms, graphic organizers, rough drafts, editing, and final copies can all fit in here. Frequently in my classroom, I get out our "Final Copy Paper," which is designer paper. Students can choose from dozens of different designs to find the one that fits their story the best, and then they write their final copy on the fancy paper instead of on regular paper in their WN's. This mostly just serves as extra motivation to write their story out all over again after the long editing process! Notice the date column on the left so you can see what they've produced each day, and so can they. :) Second to last in the WN's is the Writing Notes tab. This is found on the second to last page of the book, and this is the one section that we write "backwards." While the My Writing section slowly progresses towards the back of the Writer's Notebook, the Writing Notes section moves steadily towards the front. This is where any notes from our daily/weekly Writer's Workshop lesson is recorded. You can see the column with the date in the left margin (I love dating things so students have more accountability for what they have achieved each day). Pictured are notes about types of punctuation, tips for narrative writing, and some great ways to start your first sentence of your story. This is the very last page in the book, and it is reserved for Writing Goals. These are the goals that I help each student write based on their particular struggles in writing. Here are some sample goals from my classroom. In the past, after my student and I create and record their new writing goal, they get a colorful sticky note. On the front, they write their name and on the back, they write their goal. Then, they place this sticky beneath the writing trait poster that they're working on (Conventions, Organization, etc). From time to time, I'll have my students write about how they are doing with their writing and/or literacy goal, talk to someone about it, tell their parents about it, etc. Ideally, I meet with each student at least every other month to assess their progress on their old goal and to create a new one if necessary, but this doesn't always happen. I'm sure in your classroom, you will magically find time to meet with every student all the time! :) What do you put in your Writer's Notebook? Which lessons are best for the beginning of the year? I do want to note that some of these WW lesson ideas are not mine, but can be found in Teaching Quality Writing or are from district workshops that I attended regarding Writer's Workshop. This is simply my own take on it, and a nice way to organize everything. What tabs would you add to your WN? Again, all of these fun things, plus easy-to-print labels and additional information can be found on http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Writers-Notebook-Organization-Writers-Workshop-Starter-Kit for only $5. Thank you preemptively for supporting my work, and for sharing your love of writing with your students!
On the 70th anniversary of Operation Overlord, the war's most important assault re-told in maps.
Students complete a map activity after reading Book 13 of Homer's The Odyssey. The journey Odysseus takes begins in medias res and most of the story is told through a flashback. Students unscramble the events and create a detailed and visually appealing map. This rigorous assignment requires reconstructing 17 destinations while students include textual evidence, symbols, interventions by the gods, and an epic simile. Lesson plans and student instructions are included, along with a detailed rubric. This engaging assignment requires 2-3 class periods and can be completed individually or in groups! Materials are in PDF to print and all student materials are writeable in Google. DETAILS: ⭐ Student and Teacher Favorite ⭐ Students Unscramble the Events and Create a Map ⭐ Includes Lesson Plans & Student Instructions ⭐ Requires 2-3 Class Periods ⭐ Students Create Detailed Maps With 17 Destinations ⭐ Use After Reading Book 13 of The Odyssey ⭐ Students Learn In Medius Res & Flashback Techniques ⭐ For use in Paper and Online Classrooms Top Love and Let Lit Resources ⭐ Romeo and Juliet Unit Plan ⭐ Expository Writing Essay Unit ⭐ Poetry Unit for Writing, Analyzing, & Presenting Poetry Be the first to know about my new discounts, freebies and products: ⭐ Look for the green star next to my profile picture and click it to become a follower. You’ll receive updates when I post products, freebies and discounts. How to get TpT credit to use on future purchases: ⭐ Please go to your My Purchases page. Beside each purchase you'll see a Provide Feedback button. Simply click it and you will be taken to a page where you can give a quick rating and leave a short comment for the product. Each time you give feedback, TpT gives you feedback credits you can use to lower the cost of your future purchases. Thank you! Created By: Jacque Decker of Love and Let Lit
I have been wanting to write a “Draw and Tell” story for quite a while and share it on my blog, but the thing that has been holding me ...
Pirates, buried treasure, treasure maps, mutiny at sea, murder - what an adventure awaits the reader of this classic novel! Told in six adventures packed full of pirate fun and mystery. THE ORIGINAL AND CLASSIC STORY TOLD BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1883 "Perhaps the best adventure story ever written" | Author: Robert Louis Stevenson | Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform | Publication Date: Feb 01, 2018 | Number of Pages: 208 pages | Language: English | Binding: Paperback | ISBN-10: 1984916122 | ISBN-13: 9781984916129
RICH ROMAN HISTORY This is a rich history of the Roman Empire told in a style that makes the book not only a resource for teachers and homeschool parents, but also a reader for sixth graders and older. In fact, this book was originally written as a reader for 6th graders who are entering a phase of inner skepticism and burgeoning personalities. Roman history is a more focused and serious study than the mythology of 4th and 5th grades, much like a sixth grader's year of change. Generously illustrated with paintings by masters and maps depicting the era of Roman rule, the stories of the founding, the seven kings, the imperialism, the caesars, and the decline of Rome ring through these pages of the long-reigning Roman Empire. Master storyteller and author, Dorothy Harrer, describes with enlivening detail the rise and fall of this remarkable chapter in the history of Western Civilization. For Roman scholars right down to an enthusiastic student this is a book not to miss. DETAILS Roman Lives Written by Dorothy Harrer, Professional Educator. Published by Waldorf Publications, January 15, 2016. Age: 11+ years Class 6/6th Grade 0.33" x 10.0" x 7.01“ (0.7lbs) 126 pages Softcover
As I told you in the previous The Story of Astraterra post, the world of Astraterra consists of shards of a broken ringworld connected together by a vast blue sky and the ancient fargates. This time I’m going to tell a bit more about those islands and the different cultures inhabiting the islands. The … Continue reading »
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La India es un país del sur de Asia cuyo nombre proviene del río Indo. El nombre «Bharata» se emplea para hacer referencia a la formación del país, al aludir al antiguo emperador mitológico Bharata...
A Visual Translation of the Story of The Legend of King Arthur as told by T. H. White – A Teacher Resource designed by LPO in 2010
