School starts tomorrow. Even after 18 years of doing this, I still get excited.
Anyway, here are a couple of shameless plugs:
Brainscramble.com – Wacky wordies, trick questions, what I like to call Mental Floss. Great for Friday warm ups or so-called sponge activities (do they still call them that?) or just to get the brain working.
AboutSEHinton.com – All kinds of background info, interviews, reflections on the 40th anniversary of The Outsiders, and a lot more.
Time for nigh nigh.
(Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]
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