Fantasy Geopolitics

I know many people play Fantasy Football and this year I tossed my hat in and I am playing a weekly Fantasy Hockey for free of course (trying to win a RAM truck or $1000 weekly prize).  Today I am posting about a Fantasy game you can play with your students in a Social Studies/Current Events class.  It is called Fantasy Geopolitics and you pick countries that will be mentioned in the News the most.  It is free to play but you are only allowed 5 players in your league but if you have teams of 5 or 6 that should cover your class.  You can always pay a $20 monthly fee or $99 yearly fee and have up to 150 people entered.  To see the website click here.  To see Mr Klatt's team picking assignment click here.  To see Mr Klatt's website on Fantasy Geopolitics click here.

Good luck on your exams and I will be back posting after your exams.

Vocabulary Time-fillers

From their website "As much as we plan out our lessons in detail, we sometimes have a few minutes we need to fill. It’s not long enough to start a new topic, but we can (and should) fill it with meaningful activities. Check out this list of French vocabulary time-fillers so you won’t always end up playing hangman and tic-tac-toe!".  I am sure you could use these ideas in your Spanish classroom too.  To see some of the ideas click here.

Teaching Current Events and Math

They had more ideas on current events but I decided to only post the ones for math but please click here to see the whole article.  

There's plenty of math in the news too!

Figuring an average. Students might collect classified "Homes for Sale" ads for ten homes in a given area or for homes of a given size (e.g., two-bedroom homes). Invite students to figure from those ads the average cost for a home. (Or students might figure the average rent for homes of similar characteristics from the "Apartments for Rent" section of the newspaper.)

More ad math. Invite each student to choose a job ad from the newspaper classifieds; the ad must include a yearly salary figure. (Teach students that the term "40K" often seen in job ads is short for $40,000.) Invite students to figure from that salary figure the average monthly, weekly, daily (based on a 5-day week), and hourly (based on an 8-hour day) salary for that job.

Ad math #3. Provide a group of five ads from a local newspaper and the section of the paper that describes how much it costs to place an ad. Invite students to use the per-word or per-line cost information to figure out how much it cost to run each of the five ads.

Guess-timating! Provide each student with the copy of a news story. (Story length will vary depending on grade level.) Invite students to count the number of words in each of the first five lines of the story and to guess-timate, based on that figure, how many words long the whole story is. Older students might average the number of words in the first five lines and consider half-lines and other elements of a story to come up with a more accurate figure. Let students share their estimates and how they arrived at them. Then inform students of the exact number of words in the story (which you have pre-counted). A prize goes to the winner!

Furnish a home! Invite students to use store ads to figure the cost of furnishing a home. You might provide a list of items for each of four rooms, including a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and a bedroom. For example, living room furniture might include a couch and side chair, a coffee table, a television, and an air conditioner. Older students might also need to figure the cost of carpeting the living room! (Options: Provide students with a budget for furnishing a four-room home and let them set priorities for the furnishings they'll select. For older students, state and local sales taxes might be figured as part of the total cost.)

Removing Backgrounds

I posted in May 2016 about how to remove the background from a picture (think greenscreen).  That post  can be seen by clicking here.  Here is a new website that you might want to try to do the same thing.  The website is called Remove Background and can be found by clicking here.

Current Events and First Nations

If you are teaching any of the First Nations courses you might want to go to this site and check out the article on "The First Inhabitants of Canada".  To see it click here.    Kids Go Global is a great website for teaching Current Events.  Just click here to go to their main website.

Art and Art History

If you need some Art and Art history links for your students projects here are a couple to look at.

The Mother of All Art and Art History Links Page by the U of Michigan - Click here.

Art History Resources by Christopher Witcombe - Click here.

Economic Webinars

If you are teaching Economics and would like to attend a webinar you might want to check this site out.  Here is what they say on their site, "The Council for Economic Education is pleased to offer professional development webinars for teachers nationwide. The webinars cover multiple topics on how to integrate personal finance and economics in the classroom and create a fun learning experience for your students.

When you attend the webinar(s), you will leave with relevant lessons, resources and tools that can be implemented the next day. Also, New York State teachers earn one Continuing Education Unit (CEU) for each webinar. If you are interested, but cannot attend the live webinar, please register to get access to the archived version. You must attend a live webinar or listen to a recorded webinar for at least 45 minutes in order to receive a certificate."

To see the website click here.

What's Going On In This Graph?

The New York Times runs a weekly online article called "What's Going On In This Graph?".  It is a great opportunity to engage your math/science students.  This one I have chosen would be great for your math students studying finance, loans, amortization etc.  To see the article click here.  To see previous articles click here.  Below is a graph of another article they have students compare a graph of the age of first-time mothers in 1980 versus a graph in 2016 and compare.

Literature Quote Bingo tied to Current Events

This game was produced by Terri Eichholz and is on the NY Times Learning Network.  Given in Bingo format, each square has a famous quote from literature.  The students job is to list a current event or historical real-life event or person that fits the quote.  To see the pdf click here.  Thanks to Richard Byrne for having this on his website.

Interactive Street Art Chalk Murals

This is from Apex High School..."After a week of planning and chalking, our interactive chalk murals are ready for some interactivity! Each mural was designed to be interacted with in some way. You might roast a marshmallow, gaze at the stars or steal gold from a fire breathing dragon!   Creating the murals was up to us, how you participate is up to you. Have fun, take some photos and post them."  To see the website click here.

Runaway Journeys

The Schomburg Center for Research in  Black Culture along has an interesting site to use if you are studying slave migration and the Underground Railway.  To check it out click here.

Re-Energize Your Classroom in the New Year

Need a mid-semester pick me up after getting back from the winter break?  If so, Edutopia has some ideas on their webpage.  To see some of the ideas, click here.