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It's old-school, I know. The overhead projector, as a tool of classroom technology, is so old-school that Matt actually scored this one for free from campus, and I heard a nasty rumor that our local public school district, which is going broke and therefore firing librarians and teachers and cutting world languages and music and nature education, etc., dumped off all its overhead projectors during the city's recent day for free electronic waste disposal.
However, we of this house are THRILLED to have an overhead projector. It is crucial to my future plans to write neatly on the walls in Sharpie (stay tuned), and the kids thoroughly enjoy themselves with transparencies, markers, and huge newsprint pages taped to the wall for muralizing. See thusly:
I use my scanner and inkjet transparency film for my part of the enterprise, and the kids use their awesomeness in telling me what they want me to make for them. So far, in addition to the horse skeleton, we have a map of the spread of horses throughout the world, a United States outline, an outline of the 13 original colonies (I love you, Megamaps!!!), and later tonight I promised to make a transparency of the Greek alphabet.
I know, no rainbow project today! But don't worry--the big kid's rainbow party shorts are waiting for me to add a waistband and bias in purple flannel, and in the stove are rainbow cake layers orange and yellow, while the red layer finishes cooling on the counter before being laid in the freezer. And also?
I found the Hawaiian dude's cover of "Somewhere over the Rainbow." This party is going to be AWESOME!
5 comments:
carl still prefers to use those projectors for teaching. but, he's old school all the way!
the cake sounds ridiculously awesome!
I can still remember my sixth grade teacher writing on the transparency and occasionally licking the tip of the pencil so that it would write better.
Gross! I don't think we had an overhead projector in my sixth grade, but my school was VERY strange, as well.
I used overhead projectors a LOT when I was first teaching--I did a lot of classroom analysis of, say, magazine ads or whatever, so I'd have color transparencies made of them. It was after I got back from my academic year-long maternity leave with Willow that I was all, "Whoah! What's all this new stuff?" They'd put technology kiosks into all the classrooms in Ballantine while I was gone, and I have to say, it was pretty great, especially when you're analyzing pop culture, to be able to pull up a youtube video or something off of flikr.
Of course, Oncourse also became a big deal in that time, and I had to start doing my gradebooks online so that students could email me bratty questions the SECOND their grade had posted, so there you go...
Where did you get the world map with the spread of horses? All my 4yo wants to learn about is horses, so I have decided to use that to my advantage. We have a not so great world map that we have started putting up note cards with info on specific horse breeds and where they originated. Would be neat to have a world map already set up with the horses and pick which ones to learn about that way :)
It's one of those Smithsonian Handbooks. The girls have tons of these kid-sized, soft cover, Smithsonian books--dinosaurs, ocean life, butterflies, mammals, horses, cats--and they LOVE them all. The map of the spread of horses is near the front of the Horse handbook, and it just shows how horsemen spread the three major strains of horses--African, Asian, and European (maybe, I don't quite remember now), but later there's a breakdown of what countries and continents originate different horses, and I bet that would be PERFECT for what you want to do.
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