100 Day Project

I know, I'm like two years late to the 100 Day Project bandwagon. But the idea still has merit. I wanted to start another personal project with a structure that enables me to stick with it. A few years back I did a self-portrait a day for a year, but I was inconsistent and actually ended up making less than 200 self-portraits that year. I'm thinking 100 days will be an easier commitment and I'll actually do it this time around.

I'm not a real doctor, but I am a real worm. (Drawing from August 2015)

So here's the plan: I am going to create something involving hand-lettering every day for 100 days. I've been doing this inconsistently for a couple months now and I want to get into a habit so I can improve my hand-lettering skills and build some discipline. Usually I write things that I find myself saying over and over to Isaac, but I'll probably throw in some favorite quotes and whatnot as well. So today will be day 1 and I will end on July 6, 2016 after 100 days. I will post pictures of all my entries to this blog. The pics might not be great because I am just going to use my phone to minimize barriers.

Here goes! Stay tuned for day 1...

To the Moon

I just discovered that NASA (in cooperation with ASU, incidentally) has a website full of high resolution photos from their missions. Cool! You can even download the raw photo files if you want. I'm going to print one of the Gemini mission photos for the baby's room.

Writing and Mental Health

Here's an interesting article/time-traveling website from the 90s that I found about how to use writing to improve your mental health. Sounds worth trying!

Common Core Critical Words List

This post's primary purpose is to make a pinnable link to a resource I found listing the 55 "critical words" that are listed in the common core appendix B.

Here's the fabulous picture that I've selected so that I can pin it. Ha.

who killed cock robin?

holy moly! who killed cock robin is one edgy picture book. spoiler alert: it was the sparrow, with his arrow! here's one of many fantastic illustrations:

who saw him die? i, said the fly. on the next page they ask who caught his blood. children were apparently made of sterner stuff in 1865.

My House: Where Projects Go to Die

This morning whilst perusing the blogs, I saw this house tour on apartment therapy (really nice, btw!). I noticed their industrial-looking dining table and it made me think about my dining table project. Whatever happened to that, you ask? Here's the sad state of affairs on that one:

See how it's mocking me? Just sitting there, gigantic and unfinished. (On the plus side, the cats really love its current location because it's great for monitoring us when we're in the living room.)

We hired a welder to make the base, and I bought some reclaimed lumber that I was going to use to "simply" make the top, using Daniel's DIY countertop method. However, I have come to realize that it's going to be a huge pain in the ass, and realistically, beyond my abilities and access to tools. The joists are not de-nailed as Rebuilding Exchange claimed, and a few of them are warped, which would make it nearly impossible to form them into a flat table top without planing them (and honestly I don't even know if a planar can fix that—I just don't have whole lot of knowledge about woodworking.) Not to mention, my time and ability to do projects right now is pretty limited. So, we've decided to hire a carpenter to make the tabletop for us. Know any good carpenters in Chicago?

teaching vocabulary

Hi readers. Just a forewarning: this is a bit of a brain dump about vocabulary instruction. I have been thinking a bit about vocabulary instruction, explicit and otherwise. The curriculum we have at school, while it has a decent word list, has really cheesy stories that are inauthentic, don't have a very familiar context for the kids we teach, and the vocabulary words are isolated within the context of vocabulary instruction. We have been puzzling over a more authentic way to teach vocabulary, mainly thinking about better read-alouds, and teaching fewer words that we (and students) can use throughout the day and can be incorporated into a variety of activities and disciplines.

Here's what I currently know about vocabulary and vocabulary instruction:

There's a huge gap in vocabulary before kids enter school based on their socio-economic status.

Most vocabulary (approximately 80%) is learned through someone providing an explanation of what a word means. So, merely reading a wide variety of texts will not automatically increase a child's vocabulary. They need someone (a parent, a teacher, a text) to provide an explanation of what a word means.

Schools aren't doing a very good job of teaching vocabulary, especially in primary grades.

In thinking about teaching vocabulary, it's helpful to think about three tiers of vocabulary. The first tier is everyday verbal vocabulary. The second tier is academic vocabulary, which is basically just words that appear more often in print than in speech but are fairly common words. (These two categories are obviously relative to the speaker.) The third tier is domain-specific language. This is specialized language used to describe very specific ideas in a particular discipline, such as addition, chrysalis, or viscosity.

One really important aspect of understanding word meanings is understanding word relationships. Synonyms, antonyms, shades of meaning such as the degree of strength a word indicates, are all really important aspects of understanding a word. Understanding how words are related through a root helps children be flexible with how they use and understand words.

Categorizing and grouping words by different commonalities is also really important in developing semantic maps of words. Some words describe parts of whole. Some words are related by a common theme, setting, or idea. Thinking about these relationships and organizing words helps build the semantic maps that are a part of truly understanding words. I haven't used concept maps much in my teaching, and when I have it's been mostly in science and math, but it seems like a really powerful (and in hindsight, obvious) tool for teaching vocabulary.

Here are a few resources I found for teaching vocabulary:

http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/spring2001/biemiller.cfm

http://www.berkeleyschools.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BUSD_Academic_Vocabulary.pdf