the cat in the hat

sally and nick  heard a bump so open the door laura laura

I like the waterfall.  It's such a beautiful picture. 
I love the flower.  I love the whole picture.



This is the story of the two Laura's that went to the pool.  They brought bathing suits and they went for a swim in the pool.  Then they came out of the pool, and they took their towels so they could dry off.  And then, they went home.  They went past the farm and saw a baby chick and the mommy chicken and heard something say "cock-a-doodle-doo".  And they didn't know what said "cock-a-doodle-doo".  And then they went into the farm and they had a pool in the farm and they had goldfish in the pool.  And they even let people go in the pool.  When they had towels on them, they took them off and they had a big diving board.  So they climbed up the ladder and dived off the diving board and into the pool with the goldfish.

Then the farmer said, "You can use this pool and you can live here."  And they said, "We want to live here!  We want to live here!".

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a guest post written Laura.  The first sentence and the title were typed by Laura, and the rest was dictated by Laura and transcribed by Mom..

English Programs - Which are the Best?

My daughter was accepted to apply for both citywide and district gifted and talented programs.  And, in true DOE fashion, we have, essentially, five days to make our decision.  I say essentially, because we learned she was accepted last week, but the DOE was on vacation last week.  So, this week, my husband and I are joining the frazzled mass of parents at open houses.  And we're being hit with all kinds of information about protocol and strategizing the program ranking, transportation options, sibling preferences, seat availability and all sorts of complications that only New York City could invent.  I learned the difference between district programs (who have enrichment), and city programs (that offer acceleration as well as enrichment).  I could even tell you the difference between acceleration and compaction.  What we want, of course, is a good education for our daughter.  And for parents in NYC who seek a quality education, the choices are tough, tougher, and downright shitty. 

Before we even entered this rat's nest, we had to fight for a place at our zoned school.  Our zoned school, the reason we purchased a house in a pricy neighborhood, announce in October that they were overcrowded and, naturally, they were this close to passing a resolution to move the zone border.  Actually, they didn't tell us as much as we found out.  And, again, naturally, our house, bought specifically so that our daughter could attend this school, was this close to being placed outside this border, for the year my child was to enter the school.  Four hundred petitions, hours spent on hold to get the run-around from DOE officials, unanswered emails, and many impassioned speeches later, the rezoning was voted down.  Rejoice! 

Then came the lotto.  Since the zone was not redrawn, the school now needed to restrict the number of children admitted into kindergarten (actually, the size of zone has nothing to do with the overcrowding, but that's another story).  This is where our luck changed.  Tootie Pie was admitted to the school.  Cue the confetti!  Wonder at your good fortune!  Argue about which parent will enroll her!  And, then, the results came from the gifted and talented: 99th percentile.  Which is why I've now become that parent, the very person I could not stand: the hyperinvolved, earnestly asking overly specific questions, dangerously armed with a little knowledge, panicked, overambitious parent.  Or, at least, I will be until Friday.

So, we are attending the open houses.  Maybe this is a mistake; getting our hopes up for dream schools that will never meet our expectations.  My husband and I are math teachers, and so we know the terminology and programs being thrown at parents, and we feel pretty smug that we have a grasp of at least one small part of this overwhelming puzzle.  However, English Language Arts is a different story for us; they're really razzle-dazzling us here, and unlike with the math, we don't know what any of it means, or if it's good or bad.  Does anyone know a good English program being used today?  Fountas and Pinnell, balanced literacy, writer's workshop, write source, leveled reading: aren't these all fancy words for the ELA equivalent of "fuzzy math"?  Do students learn grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation anymore?  ELA teachers, please weigh in.  Quickly!!!

Miniature Saarinen Tulip Table How To Tutorial

The Tulip table is complete.  It is wonky, but it is complete.  I am creating another original model with hopefully smoother edges.  If you're interested in the process, it is detailed below:

Materials:

A fresh-out-of-the-oven batch of marble table tops

• Sculpey clay for the original
• wet/dry sandpaper
• Smooth-On Oomoo 30 Silicon Mold Making rubber
• Legos
• rubber bands
• vaseline
• non-sulphur clay (I used Plasticina)
• Straw
• Smooth-Cast 325 plastic
• Plastic spray paint
• Sculpey clay in white, black, transluscent and pewter for "marble" top
• Pasta machine

Giving the bases, and a toilet, a spray of paint

The hardest part is the model.  All I can suggest is either an art degree with a major in sculpture, or the patience of a saint and tons of sanding.  Once the original is complete, make a mold box (I use Legos), and fill the box to about halfway with non-sulphur clay (sulphur will eat away at your original).  Push the model into the clay and make a pour hole at the bottom with a straw.  Make registration keys with a small, round object.  Pour the rubber slowly over the model until covered.  Allow to dry and remove clay.  Cover the top of the rubber mold half with vaseline and allow to dry, then pour in rubber on other side.  When your mold is done, rubber band it together and pour in the plastic.  Demold and remove the flashing.  I didn't use plastic coloring, so I had to spray paint the finished product.

For the top, I mix together mostly white, with tiny bits of black, transluscent and pewter.  Roll together until the streaking is the way you like it.  Then, put it through a pasta machine and cut out a 3 inch diameter circle.  Bake, and glue the top to your base.  Hopefully someday I will come up with a video on the step-by-step. 

And here is the finished product with a Reac shell chair!

Spoilt for Choice

This post is a thinly veiled brag about my daughter.  She took the OLSAT and BRSA and scored 99%.  Since most of my reading audience (Hi, Mom!) is probably not familiar with the insanity that is facing middle class parents in New York City, those acronyms are preschool intelligence tests.  So, now we have a week to apply to a gifted school if we choose.  Well, duh!  Of course we're interested.  She can apply to city or district gifted and talented programs.  There are 32 districts in the city, and there are 5 citywide G&T programs: one in Brooklyn, one in Queens, and the other 3 are in Manhattan.  The city programs in Manhattan are, naturally, much more desirable than the local district program.  The schools there are literally unbelievable.  And, our district G&T is only in its second year.  Attending school in Manhattan would be a huge inconvenience, obviously, but I want the best for my little patootie, and Manhattan is the best.  What lengths would you go to for your little one?  Would you commute from Queens to Manhattan, back to Queens (for my job), and then back to Manhattan to return to Queens?  FOR SIX, NINE or THIRTEEN YEARS? 

The face of a gifted student

Yet, this is what I wanted.  I wanted her to attend a school in Manhattan: Hunter College Elementary.  And, now that the opportunity is here, I'm seeing just how impractical it is.  Nothing like a solid dose of reality to invalidate your dreams.  I've even looked into studio apartments on the Upper West Side and I'm considering finding a new job in the city, easing the commute to only two trips a day instead of five (I cannot believe that is even an option for this commutaphobe).

I am so proud of my little girl.  She did such a good job! 

Finished Doll House



Welcome to our doll house!  Come on inside Tilted Acres!




One bedroom, with a GeoReflector (math manipulative) bed and a Marx Little Hostess dresser.



Reac Chair, chest and armoire are just marked "Hong Kong", and antlers are by La Petite Moderne.

The kitchen, which features the amazing Tomy kitchen set.  In the foreground is what I imagine is the grandmother's old stove and pump sink (it really works)

A better view of the Tomy kitchen.  Kitchen table and grandmother's stove are Renwal, and the fiberglass shell chair is Reac. 

Marx blue couch, Tomy couch and coffee table.  Ma Petite Moderne Arco Castiglione lamp.

After failing to attach the front door with hinges, twice, I ended up supergluing rubber bands to the door and frame.  Ghetto.  And, the pictures are revealing to me a fair amount of glue that will need to be touched up.  And then I have to add the trim along the bottom walls, but need a miter box before I do so.  Of course, the rooms need rugs, which is one of my latest projects.  So, apparently, a doll house is similar to a real house in that the to-do list is long and growing.  But, for me, anyhow, both are mostly fun. 

Isn't America Great?

These do not count as

dollhouses, in my mind

I bought my daughter's first dollhouse as a kit for Christmas.  Well, first, if you don't count the My Little Pony house that features a musical toilet, but technically that's a ponyhouse, right?  And, we're not counting the Polly Pocket homes, of which we had two, because, um, those are Polly houses?  Oh!  Technically one's a hotel, and the other is described as an apartment, so...  Anyhow, once I was need deep in mini-home construction aggravations, the neighborhood girls said they had something for L.  This something turned out to be two Barbie houses, plus this and this.  Then, just this week, I found another Barbie house on the side of the road, with furniture!  

When I bought the doll house kit, I joked with the woman who sold it to me that if my family had to live in a small home, then our dolls would have to, as well.  So the original plan was to have one small 1':1" dollhouse.  But aquired Barbie houses tend to be around 4' tall, and in a house with a 16'x30' footprint, one of these large play homes is plenty.  There was no way we were going to have three.  So, we played dollhouse shuffle yesterday: the dollhouse that we kept in our house went to Oma's, the one at Oma's went to our friend, and the Malibu Dream home is now in our basement.  

I have remarked on how I find just the things I'm looking for on the street.  I also find a great many things that I don't need, but that doesn't stop me from keeping it anyhow.  I believe that when you form an idea of what you want, it comes to you.  I suppose I am quite good at dreaming up material things that I need.  I need to change focus to the more important things in life that I need.  So, now, where is that six foot tall Norwegian doctor?

Apparently, I'm putting out there that I want more of these. 
I should really try to stop my subconscience from operating, else I'll be buried in a sea of pink plastic soon.

Free Math SmartBoard Math Lessons

In my biography for this blog, I assert that I know middle school math better than anyone else.  While this is something of a stretch, it is almost certainly true that I am more familiar with middle school math than you do, even if you happen to be a math teacher.  Three years ago, I was teaching Greatest Common Factor and Least Common Multiple, and I told the students that I was demonstrating just a couple of ways to find them.  One student asked if we could see some other methods, and the other students chimed in that they, too, would like a quick synopsis of other procedures.  While it may seem unbelieveable that children would want to know more ways than I'd already taught them on this rather dry, not heavily applicable to the real-world skill, remember that they would do anything to get a teacher off-topic, if only for a moment.  So, I indulged them, and while I was in the midst of my impromptu lesson I had one of those out-of-body experiences where I could see myself and I realized that I know a little too much about finding GCF and LCM.  I was thinking, gee, Linda, how did you come to know so much about this topic, and isn't it a bit strange? 
 

They try this problem, with their

fraction pieces and a timer

I have been wanting to write a guest blog, and my first post is for a "best practices" teaching website.  In this effort, I have been taking screenshots of my smartboard lessons.  These lessons represent years of work and experience, so why not show them off? 




A slide and its progression. 

From top to bottom:

the old style visual aid, wrapped in
rubber bands to hold it together;
the same prism, now on the
smart board, peeling off the layers,

breaking off the individual

 cubes and displaying

the solution.

Then, reveal correct answer, and misconception.

The screens I chose to show in the guest blog demonstrate the use of manipulatives in the classroom, which is considered a good practice, methods to dispel misconceptions, which is extremely difficult to do, and engaging, hand-on lessons, which, if you're a teacher, you know means headaches!  I've developed these lessons for use with the smartboard, and there are hundreds of slides with cartoons, turn and talks, think pair shares, reflections, procedures, do nows and links to interactive websites.  The instant access to visuals is a godsend for a teacher who is accustomed to having to draw such things as turnstiles and radiometers, to little effect.  But even better are the interactive elements.  The smartboard timers help keep students on task, and they even give me a better feel for how long three minutes really is.  I no longer have to circle the classroom with a rectangular prism made of snap cubes in my hand, demonstrating what the dimensions of the prism are.  I can spin spinners, flip coins, or toss dice without having to tell the students to "trust me, it's heads".  I do not have to buy the incredibly expensive quad-ruled chart paper to teach the coordinate plane or graphing.  And I don't have the aggravation of other teachers in my classroom blithely taking a sheet or two without permission and using them indiscriminately after I take such care to use them sparingly by plotting things in pencil and erasing it clean before the next class.  That's over $2.00 a sheet, people!  And, while I'm on the subject, do you have any idea how expensive overhead projector lightbulbs are?  They're not cheap!  Don't leave it on for the whole period, because the fan doesn't work and it's going to overheat!  I'm not paid enough for these supplies!!!  

Ahem, <straightening my tie>, where was I?  I like the smartboard.  For those of you who are interested, this is a tiny glimpse of my life as a teacher.  For fellow teachers, if you'd like copies of my smartboard lessons, I'd be more than happy to share them.  You don't even need a smartboard to use them, just a computer and a projector and a copy of the software.  This is how I use it, because I no longer have a smartboard, either.  I have most middle school math topics done, and a few 6th and 7th grade science lessons.  Leave a comment and I'll send you them.  



And if you're curious about the GCF and LCM, first off let me say that you're a bit strange, too.  No, I'm kidding: intellectual curiosity is one of the great gifts of being a human.  But follow this blog, and we just may cover it, like it or not!