Candy Fairy House

Okay, so this isn't quite science, we didn't count, pay attention to measurements or anything like that. This was strictly a mother-daughter bonding experience. I got this idea from No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids by Lisa Turner Anderson.

We started off with a wooden cutting board covered in foil. We made pink icing with white icing and red food dye.

We chose a spot in the "yard" to build the house.

We used chewy chocolate chip cookies. This was a deviation from the recipe, it called for molasses cookies. I'm not sure what those are... but they look thinner and would have been a better bet I think, and you'll see why later... Another deviation... the recipe called for "2 large flat-bottom waffle bowls" which I assumed were those things that are used to hold ice cream. I searched the ice cream cone shelf at the store and found nothing of the sort. I wasn't sure what I was going to do until I came across these tiny graham cracker pie crusts, once out of their aluminum covering, they were very fragile. This one was our second one, the first hardly made it out of the box before it broke.

So far so good... but this mini pie crust will end up breaking too.

Since the mini pie crusts did not work out, we decided to use use a non-food item out of necessity. We whipped up a batch of green icing, which we would be needing anyway. We covered the foil cup that the pie crust had come in with green icing.

Mom cut spearmint leaf candy into thin layers. Not thin enough though... the leaves constantly fell off during the process. The recipe also indicated that these leaves would be sticky enough to not need an additional adhesive. This was also not true, so we used icing which made things slightly better.

On to the second floor of the house...

And the second layer of leaves!

Oops!

A jelly bean walk way...

a chocolate granola bar door (with a jelly bean door knob)...

flower-shaped sprinkers for the garden....

green sugar for the grass...

the pond was Mom's idea, it's made from blue Jell-o...

Finished!

And so much fun!!!

Personal Reflection

I was nervous about going back to school. The last time I was in school I did not have a full-time job, a home of my own, a husband, or a child. Now all of that has changed and I worried that I wouldn't be able to balance my time among my many demands. While it hasn't been easy, I've been able to manage it and I am so happy I've started this program. This course has been exciting from day one and I don't regret my decision to go back to school one bit. In fact, over the past two or so months, I've become even more excited about becoming a media specialist, and I actually regret only taking one course.
I had no idea how much I didn't know! The thought of using podcasts or digital stories (both of which I barely knew anything about before this course) to teach content is so refreshing. (And who knew Kate Paixao would be able to learn how to use Photoshop?) When I return to working in a school, I know it's going to be so different from the pencil, paper, and text book culture that I left only four years ago.
My hopes for the rest of the semester is to learn as much as I possibly can, because I know I can use all of this in my own classroom/library. I am nervous about my Web site. I'm one of the few starting from scratch, and while I have taken courses in XHTML and have experience and knowledge of the technical side of this, I am not very good at the creative end of making a Web page look nice. I have the Robin Williams book which I hope will help, and I'm going to do my absolute best. I worry because I really want this Web site to be amazing, and while I know I can make it work with all of the bells and whistles, I want it to look appealing as well. That will be my challenge. Will we be breaking off with Hugh to work on these again, or are we restricted to lab hours at this point?
I don't want to call this a suggestion, because this is something that's out of your control. I know that as a professor you are very busy, but for the first five weeks of class I was a little nervous about how I was doing because I hadn't had any feedback up until that point. Once I read your comments on my blog at that time, my mind was put at ease. On the other hand, you have made this class so interesting and I can never believe it when 9:15 rolls around because the time just seems to fly. Keep up the good work, and thank you for motivating me!

Response to Digital Goonies

I was pleasantly surprised to see the tree octopus in one of the Digital Goonies' recent postings (I wrote a post about the tree octopus earlier.) I had heard about this Web site more than a year ago, so I thought it was old news, but I guess not. Jim mentioned similar activities to those that I listed when using a Web site like that. He also listed others that are pretty much the same idea... hoaxes. I'd really like to use these one day if I have an opportunity to teach media literacy.

I also found the posting on dialmycalls.com to be useful. It would be great if something happened last minute and I had to contact all of my students' families all at once, I could make a recording and send it to all of them. How easy and practical!

I also found superlame.com to be a fun site for making creative projects. This site helps the user to make speech bubbles and such to add to their own photos.

WebQuest Possibilities

I found two WebQuests that would work great for a school librarian in a high school. The first is called Huck Finn's Eyes, the second, Periods of American Literature.

Response to Inquiry-based Learning

Inquiry-based learning has been a hot topic at my company lately. We are striving to meet teachers' needs in this aspect. I find it challenging to think of things to offer teachers. I write magazines for Pre-K and Kindergarten students. What kind of inquiry-based activities can you offer such young children when your only medium is print? If I was teaching one of these grades, I think I'd find it easier to tackle, because I'd have access to tools, technology, and other materials. We've tried including online lesson plans that we, at least, attempt to be inquiry-based. Some examples include measuring the speed of the wind using a home-made anemometer and the penny experiment mentioned back in my earliest post. It's a work in progress, I suppose.

When I was in 5th grade I was invited to be part of a class called Academically Talented, or AT. Though I didn't know what it was called at the time, we were learning through inquiry. One project that stuck out in my mind above all others was one in which I had to "build a house." Each student had to choose a scenario. Most of the kids chose the scenario that had a family with the doctor-lawyer couple with one kid and loads of money. I chose a family whose father was a mechanic, the mother a home maker, and they had three children. I wanted a challenge(I guess I also may have chosen it because this family was my family exactly minus one sibling.)I had a budget. I knew how much each square foot of the home would cost. I had to design the house on graphing paper with enough room for the whole family. I had a separate budget for furnishings. I had to find furniture that actually existed (I looked through the J.C. Penny catalogue). Again, I stayed within my budget. This was my first experience with money management and having to make smart choices with how I spent the money. It was one of my favorite school projects as a child.

In my school library I see inquiry-based learning playing out in several ways:
1. I'd want to teach students how to think critically about the information they encounter on the Internet. I might send them to Save the Pacific Northwestern Tree Octopus or Squeez Bacon and give the students activities or guiding questions that will help them to come to their own conclusions about what these web sites are actually all about.

2. I love reading Philippa Gregory novels, as may be apparent from my reference to the White Queen twitter page in an earlier post. But after I've read one of her novels I often wonder how much of it was true and how much was made up -- because, let's face it, crazy stuff happens in those stories! I like to look at other works, films, web sites, etc, and see where I can find commonalities and decide for myself what really happened and what was made up. Okay, I know that's not too scientific, but it's only for my own enjoyment.
In a school setting, I can imagine inviting a book club group to do something similar with any historical fiction (with more hard evidence, of course). After reading a work of historical fiction, I'd invite each student to find and show proof of three events that were based on fact and three events that were most likely made up by the author. Depending on their ability level, I may guide them to the right places to do this research, but ultimately it would be up to them to figure it out. This kind of activity could tie in Historical Thinking by encouraging students to look through primary sources, when available.

Photoshop Project

I decided to make a poster using Photoshop that I could use in a classroom or a school library. It would work best for mid- to late-elementary, but the concepts are the same for any age level. I used clip art and photos from public domain and one photo I took myself. The credits are at the bottom of the poster, but they are also listed at the end of this post for legibility. The poster teaches about different fiction genres. I gave each genre a color and took a piece of clip art of a book which was originally blue and changed the color to tie it in to each color scheme. Then I took other pieces of pd clip art, pd photos, and one photo I took myself. I silho-ed the photos and placed them on the books.
It think the poster is an effective way to reach visual learners when teaching about different genres.

Credits: Book image courtesy of Public Domain Clip Art, http://www.pdclipart.org/displayimage.php?album=search&cat=0&pos=15; Girl with dog image courtesy of Public Domain Clip Art, http://www.pdclipart.org/displayimage.php?album=search&cat=0&pos=2; Little Bo Peep image courtesy of Kate Paixao; Image of Castle courtesy of Jon Sullivan, pdphoto.com, http://www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=&pg=6126; Image of Fingerprint courtesy of Public Domain Clip Art, http://www.pdclipart.org/displayimage.php?almbum=search&cat=0&pos=0; Image of Abraham Lincoln courtesy of Public Domain Clip Art, http://www.pdclipart.org/displayimage.php?album=search&cat=0&pos=1, Image of Robot courtesy of Jon Sullivan, pdphoto.com, http://www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=&pg=6548

Universal Design for Learning

I used Inspiration to break UDL down into 5 parts, Access for all, Assistive Techonology tools, Application, Framework, and Digital Media.
I color coded each branch to make them more easily discernible from one another.
I found the article helpful in that the missing piece in a lot of educational programs is that we create lessons and then try to adapt them later. It makes much more sense to create lessons with all abilities in mind.