clair055

I keep several little reminders of my past on my desk at school. I have three small clay bowls I made in elementary school that at one time or another I presented to my mother for Mother’s Day or her birthday. One of the bowls stayed on a table in our living room for years with a small dried flower arrangement in it. On a picture stand I have a small picture I drew when I was a child that was glued to a piece of ply board and then covered with a clear glaze. I have a mold of my tiny hand made in second grade painted shimmery gold. I remember my teacher, Mrs. Smith, telling us to make sure we had signed our names to the bottom so that they would be true works of art. Today when my students explore my room at the beginning of the year they oogle my relics and ask, “Did you really make this when you were little?” I point to my handprint and proudly tell them, “Yes, and if you don’t believe me look at the name on the bottom.” In my home I have a coffee table that Mom and Dad had in their ...

These days everyone’s family tree is a little confusing due to the increase in divorce, remarriages, and cohabitation. I wouldn’t want to be a genealogist in one hundred years or so trying to decipher family lines. Activities and projects which revolve around the family unit can mean a teacher is treading into dangerous waters. A few years ago I thought it would be a really great activity to have a group of language arts students interview family members and obtain the recipes for special dishes that family members always want to have at family gatherings. You know, Aunt Mary’s Creamed Corn, Uncle Jim Bob’s spare rib sauce and so on. We were going to take the two or three recipes from each class member and students were going to write out the recipes and illustrate the pages. All of the pages were going to be bound into one booklet, mass produced, and shared with the entire class. Sounds like an interesting activity right? Our first experience with history is learning our own family hi...

Lesson Planning 101 teaches that students must be engaged in the lesson for learning to take place. Charlotte Danielson of the Educational Testing Service states students should not simply spend “time on task” but should be actively involved in the curriculum. She calls it “minds-on learning.” In fact many researchers have shown that teachers who are most successful develop activities with students’ basic psychological and intellectual needs in mind (Ames, Alderman & Midgley, and Strong, et. al.). Those statements sound good to me. I agree with them, however, I often feel as if I am doing a frantic tap dance attempting to keep everyone focused and learning at the same time. Spinning plates is the best way I know how to describe delivering instruction in a classroom that has quite a menu of interruptions from loose teeth, unannounced visitors, and the ever squawking intercom. From time to time the content I teach actually gives me aide and comfort and makes my tap dancing steps a li...

This post first ran in January, 2006 on my seventh day of blogging. I guess I thought it very important to establish early on just why history is so important. Enjoy! One reason why history is important it that the past has value to our society. Thousands of people throughout history have gone to great lengths to record history through newspapers, diaries, journals, saved letters, family Bibles, and oral traditions. It is believed that Aborigines of Australia actually managed to hang onto their history for 40,000 years by word of mouth. History is the narrative of mankind . It provides answers as to how people lived as well as provide for us the roots to certain ideas concerning laws, customs, and political ideas. Have you ever wondered where the rude gesture of pointing your middle finger at people you are annoyed at came from? One origin story states it reportedly began at the Battle of Agincourt where the French demanded the surrender of the English longbow men. The French demand ...

The following post first appeared here at History Is Elementary in September, 2006 and is titled A Typical Day . This particular post was picked up and printed in its entirety for a USA Today article regarding teachers who blog. This post deals with testing and how testing weeks can turn a school upside down…..how a typical day can become anything but typical. The picture posted here is my classroom as it appeared in 2006. Today, a lovely friend of mine has custody of MY room, and I’m glad she’s the one keeping watch over it. So if you came to my classroom this week or next would you see a typical day in Elementaryhistoryteacher’s classroom? Unfortunately you would miss out. It simply wouldn’t happen. My school has entered the realm of CRAZY SCHOOL which is a parallel universe created by all of the education stakeholders across America. CRAZY SCHOOL is where you take a smooth running machine that has been in operation for some five weeks and throw it to the four winds. The result is a ...

Augusta, Georgia is front and center this week as the golf infamous and elite arrive to play the much heralded course at August National. President Eisenhower loved August National…..this post relates a little about his experiences there, and there are a couple of links at the end to other posts I’ve written concerning the course. David Eisenhower became a member of the August National Club in 1948. Prior to becoming president he managed to visit the course five different times. Ike loved golf. Estimations go as high as 800 regarding the number of rounds of golf Eisenhower played during his eight years in office visiting various courses. Some of those rounds were played during the 29 visits he made to Augusta National. a Golf Digest article advises President Eisenhower loved golf so much he installed a putting green on the south lawn of the White House and during inclement weather he hit long irons into a net in the basement. With the help of donations from club members a cabin was bu...

This is a true story I wrote in 2006 ……while it deals with my memories about the death of my great-grandmother, it is also a humorous story regarding a very old-time southern funeral, the Easter Bunny, and what can happen to your gum on a very, very warm Spring day…… Enjoy! I’m sure, dear reader, you are familiar with the definition of sticky as it refers to candy. Did you know that there is now a cyberspace definition for sticky? It has to do with how well your site attracts traffic. Sticky sites have high volumes of traffic, especially the returning kind. Has your mind ever returned to a memory due to a sound you’ve heard, a smell, or even a particular holiday? I guess we could call those memories “sticky” because we keep returning to them. Yesterday morning as I awoke I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. My mind instantly returned to a memory that is sticky in more ways than one. My father’s family buried his grandmother on Easter Sunday. She was 102; I was 6. Every Easter I reca...