Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Modern Monasticism

St. Anthony's Egyptian Coptic Monastery at Coma, Egypt.

I'm teaching the history of the Middle Ages this year, and some of our first lessons are about monasteries. I thought it might be interesting to visit a modern monastery, if there were one nearby. You can click this link for a List of American Monasteries. Once you're on the page, the quickest way to locate a monastery in your area is to search for your state on the page (ctrl+F). You can then copy the name of the monastery and paste it into a google search. This will generate links to the monastery's web site. From there you can learn about visitor's hours, dress codes, and behavioral guidelines.

Here are links to a couple of the monasteries I found in North Carolina:
  1. Protection of the Theotokos Monastery (Weaverville, North Carolina)
  2. Panagia Prousiotissa Greek Orthodox Monastery (Troy, North Carolina)

Monday, August 20, 2012

Digestive System Online Resources


 When I was searching for resources to help review the digestive system with my favorite (and only) student, I discovered some pretty cool tools! Watch the video first, and then let your child play the online game as a review. The game actually has more detailed information than the video, but the video provides a firm foundation from which to launch the fun.

http://interactivehuman.blogspot.com/2008/05/digestion-interactive-game-for-kids.html


Here's a quick, visually-engaging lesson using common household props to explain how the body digests food. While this is more like an overview of the digestive system, it will keep a child's attention until the end. Children will love learning where "farts" come from, and I'm pretty sure they will enjoy timing the digestive experiment (with corn) he suggests at the end.

This is a great online resource for teaching your child about digestion of a variety of foods. Not only is the game interactive, it is also rich with vocabulary words and fantastic animation to illustrate the information which is given in bite-sized chunks so as not to overwhelm the child. (Sorry, couldn't resist the pun!)

A Beginner Blog from a Lifetime Learner

I'm not really sure where this blog will go, or if anyone in the world will ever view it, but I'm committing myself to posting links to the "cool tools" I find online (or create myself) to help make the lives of us teachers a little easier. Lately, I've been learning a lot about Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. After listening to a mini-lecture by Dr. Karen Newtzie and Harriet Dawson from Rappahannock Community College entitled, "Using Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to Improve Instruction," I created the following PDF document for my own reference. The chart is based on one of the slides in the lecture, and I added a few notes as to how this chart can be used in lesson planning. I hope you like it. 

Click the link below to download a hi-res PDF of this image