Hope your holiday break has been going swimmingly. 

Have you had a spare moment to reflect on what’s been going really well for you this year?

Consider submitting it as a lesson plan to School Library Monthly. 

(You even get paid upon publication - just in case the elves went a bit overboard this year.)

Details here.

Ahhhh, I love how vacation gives me time to sleep in, catch up, and even get a bit ahead of the game!

In the right sidebar of the blog (or in the links below) are links to the last four Nudging Toward Inquiry scenarios for the year.  This is the monthly School Library Media column that invites you to improve a boring, low-level thinking project into something more in line with the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.

Try your hand at these scenarios, and maybe you’ll be published in School Library Monthly this spring!

• The Pet Report - Summary: Answer the teacher’s questions about the pet.  Copy those notes onto a poster for National Pet Week. Try not to cry that your pet hamster has already exceeded its average life span and may be dying while you are at school filling in these dumb blanks. (This is the scenario we played with at the AASL Nudging session in Charlotte.)
• The Holiday Report - Summary: Choose a holiday from around the world and fill in the spaces on the graphic organizer. Then create a PowerPoint.
• The Planet Report - Summary: Each child in the class will be assigned one of the planets, answer the teacher’s questions, and create a poster. They will hang in the hall next to their Styrofoam solar system models!!!!
• Science Fair - Summary: The “they do it all at home” method isn’t working. Parents are disproportionately involved, the kids don’t demonstrate scientific understanding, and everybody is bored.  How can you move past food-coloring-tinted carnations?

You’ll get more details when you click on the links above.

We LOVE to hear the diversity of responses that come in in response to scenarios.  Improving instructional experiences for kids can take many forms.  Consider these:

• Moving individual to collective knowledge
• Moving from solo to collaborative learning
• Changing resources used
• Changing the product created (or tailoring the product in new, more valuable ways)
• Professional development for educators
• Making parents learnign partners
• Allowing more student choice
• Replacing teacher-generated questions with student-generated questions
• Increasing motivation by bringing in technology/Web 2.0 tools
• Changing learning modalities (print, visual, etc.)

Help us pool our collective expertise and share it in the magazine.

Thanks in advance!

Consider adding to Buffy Hamilton’s VoiceThread and sharing your experience, which we can then share with our colleagues.

Visit the VoiceThread here.