One Teacher's Thanksgiving Gift to His Students

Those of us who teach classes know how hard it is to keep the students' attention right before a holiday.  Here is how one teacher battled that issue this Thanksgiving.  Matthew Weathers, who teaches math and computer science at Biola University, used a mixture of virtual and digital reality to inject a bit of fun and talk about Thanksgiving in one of his math classes this month.

You can watch his mixed digital/physical self below:

A Winning Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving here in America, and there are so many things that I'm thankful for.  I'm thankful for all the technology that connects me to those of you out there who are reading this.  I'm thankful for my computers in particular, which reminds me that I'm thankful for a light that left us this year, the inimitable Steve Jobs.  I'm thankful for my family, I'm thankful for my friends, I'm thankful that I get to homeschool, and I'm thankful that we live in such an abundant country and get to eat a wonderful meal of turkey (and ham, in our case) and mashed potatoes and vegetables and dessert (chocolate, yay!) and such.

I'm also thankful for things that have gone well for my friends and that remind me all the things I take for granted.  So this year, I'm grateful for working refrigerators, dry floors...or just floors in general in another case, catalytic converters, and oven burners.  I'm also grateful that my friend, whose father is about to pass on to whatever it is that happens after this life, gets to be up there with him and her entire family and to mark this transition with the meaning and connection that it deserves.

But one thing that really makes this Thanksgiving special, compared to all of them, is that today I wrote over 3,000 words on my novel, which takes me over the 50,000 word mark of words written since November 1.  That also means that, in the eyes of NaNoWritMo, that I am an official "Winner."  It feels very special to pass that particular milestone on Thanksgiving itself.  That wasn't what I was planning, but it's the way things worked out.

The downside to this august occasion is that I'm still not close to actually finishing the book, which is my real goal for my writing for November.  But I don't have a lot of commitments outside the house this long weekend, so maybe I can churn out a lot of the end in the next few days.

But whatever, I've earned that NaNoWriMo winner badge!  As has my son, who has far exceeded his goal already (and his goal was double the word count goal recommended by the organizers) !

So I'm thankful that I'm a winner.  I hope you can spend some time this weekend thinking about the ways that you and your family are winners, too!

Curriculum Resource: Thanksgiving Science From Science Jim

Here's a little bit of learning to sneak in for the holiday.  Our favorite online science educator, Science Jim, has posted a video of a class he did last year on Thanksgiving topics, covering topics like whether eating turkey really makes you sleepy and did Ben Franklin really try to combine turkey and electricity.  Just click below to sneak in a little science along with all the good food!



Science Jim Show: Thanksgiving and Ben Franklin! from Science Jim on Vimeo.

Google's Thanksgiving Doodle Makes You a Turkey Designer

Google's Thanksgiving Doodle came early this year, and it's so much fun, I wanted to let people know about it.  At least today (Tuesday, November 22), if you go to the Google Home Page, you will see a cartoon turkey. But if you click on the turkey's head, feet, and tail feathers, you can change them to your preference.  If you click on the wing, it will rapidly cycle through all the choices simultaneously, which gives you some ideas about your options.

Once you have created your custom turkey, you can either share it through Google+ or through a weblink. So, for example, to see the turkey I designed, visit: http://g.co/doodle/d7bz39  .


If you create your own turkey, please share it in the comments below--I would love to see people's creative turkeys!  It's a fun and easy way to get into the holiday spirit.

Thanksgiving Fun

We're still in Thanksgiving mode here.  But here are a couple of free online games appropriate for middle schoolers that have a Thanksgiving theme:

Turkey Flibriks is one of those filing tiles games where you have to blast away tiles to keep them from hitting the bottom.  But it also combines a Concentration-type memory match component.  They show you a line of tiles (which all have Thanksgiving pictures, like turkeys, pumpkins, and Pilgrim hats), then flip them over and they start falling.  If you can remember where the pictures are, get the best match and tiles disappear.  Easy for the first row or so, but harder as time goes on.  This is the perfect Thanksgiving game--seasonal, not too hard so either kids or adults get frustrated, not too fast paced, but not so slow or easy that it gets boring.

Turkey Swap is one of those puzzles with nine pieces with ten slots, and you have to move them around to get them in the right place.  But in this case, you are trying to get nine turkeys to switch places with nine pigs in as few moves as possible.  This is not as frustrating as those ones where you are trying to create a picture, but getting it done in few moves is not that easy, either.

Enjoy!

Giving Thanks

I've been doing this blog for almost three months now, and one of the most fascinating things to me has been how I can be writing here in my little part of North Carolina, but be read by people all over the world.  In the past three months, my blog has been accessed by hundreds of readers from every continent across the globe except Antarctica.  For example, while my hits this past week have WAY predominantly come from the US, I've also had 8 contacts from Canada, 6 from Denmark, 5 from Singapore, and 2 each from the UK, Russia, and Kenya.

So for my non-US readers, let me explain that today is the holiday of Thanksgiving, the day when we gather with friends and families, cook a big turkey meal in honor of the first settlers who arrived here to find such a new and tasty wild bird on which to feast (although, with all the different diets people pursue here, there is more and more deviation from the "typical" Thanksgiving meal), and give thanks for our many blessings.  And since I have so much to be thankful for, I thought I would share at least the ones that relate to the subject of this blog with you all, my virtual community.

Things I am thankful for this year include:

• that my circumstances allow me to homeschool my son, which I believe is the best educational experience for him and the most fun I can imagine for me;
• that North Carolina has such a hands-off policy regarding homeschooling, allowing us the freedom to design curriculum and programs that meet our specific needs;
• that this community is so supportive of homeschooling and has so many classes and activities geared to this population;
• that my homeschooling support group has so many diverse, interesting, intelligent, free-thinking, innovative, committed, and really caring parents who contribute so much to my son and to me as we pursue our homeschooling journey
• that my spiritual community not only supports me in my own continued development, but has entrusted me with the opportunity to create a new "rite of passage" world religion Sunday School curriculum for our middle school youth;
• and that despite it all--the political debates, the lack of resources, the troubling policy issues, the implied insult by politicians that outsiders can do a better job running things than professional educators, the relatively low salaries, the continued interference by bureaucrats and policy makers--that there are so many dedicated, professional, and wonderful school teachers who spend their days (and too often, nights) serving the majority of children in Wake County (and, really, throughout the world) who attend school.  I had dinner Tuesday night with two of them, and even during a rare "Girls Night Out" on a long holiday weekend, they kept going back to talking about individual kids and things they could do to make their school experience better.  With all the things school teachers have to deal with, I think their job is much tougher than mine, and my hat is off to them.

In short, it is my greatest joy and privilege that I get to be a mother to one and a teacher to several dozen other extraordinary young people, and I feel very blessed that this is how I get to spend this portion of my life.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!