Do your students know how to protect themselves from email scams? Can they recognize fraudulent websites? Can you? Test your online security savvy by playing this educational game from Carnegie Mellon University:
Cat Quotations
I found this worksheet on the KISS Grammar website, and I loved the quotations so much I just had to share them:
In a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats.
— English proverb
One cat just leads to another.
— Ernest Hemingway
Bloglines Potluck “Carnival”
One last, long weekend before we dive full-speed into school and co-op classes and swim lessons and karate and art lessons and…well, this may be my last chance to catch up on the backlog in my Bloglines folders.
With over 100 feeds, there is no way I will keep up with all of you during the school year. So here is my end-of-summer fling, a sort of unofficial “Best of (my) Bloglines” carnival, in which I share my personal favorites from the last few weeks of RSS.
I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I have.
I Could Sit Here Forever…
…with Princess Kitten‘s baby sitting on my lap, sucking her thumb paw. Of course, it is difficult to get any typing done, and the laundry that is beeping at me from the other room will just have to wait its turn. Peace is a purring kitten.
Trouble with Percents
Can your students solve this problem?
There are 20% more girls than boys in the senior class.
What percent of the seniors are girls?
This is from a discussion of the semantics of percent problems and why students have trouble with them, going on over at MathNotations. (Follow-up post here.)
Our pre-algebra class just finished a chapter on percents, so I thought Chickenfoot might have a chance at this one. Nope! He leapt without thought to the conclusion that 60% of the class must be girls.
After I explained the significance of the word “than”, he solved the follow-up problem just fine.
Living with History
My daughter has been decorating the kitchen, and she decided to hang these old photos that came with the house. The frames needed repairs, so I took the opportunity to scan the photos. (Click for larger view.)
I wish I knew who the people were, or when the photos were taken. The house shows changes over the years. Eventually, the back porch was closed in to create a pantry and laundry room off the kitchen.
The horse cart picture has a date across one corner. It looks like 9/1908.
This young boy has taught his pony a trick: to step up on a box or something — I can’t quite see what.
Can anyone identify this car? The boy looks sweet with a bouquet for his mother. I wonder if that’s her in the driver’s seat.
Best Kitten Toy Ever
Take one ring from a milk jug, one plastic straw, and two leftover ribbons. Add one 8- to 12-week-old kitten.
Mix together on a hard-surface floor, and enjoy!
The Procrastinating Blogger Award
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
Joyful Days kindly nominated me for the Thinking Blogger Award back in the days of the dinosaurs. Well, she isn’t that old, really — it was only last April. I am grateful to her for thinking of me, and ever since then I have been thinking deeply about whom to nominate in my turn. Or, to be more precise, I printed out the nomination post as a reminder, and then it got lost in a pile of “to sort/read/file” papers on a shelf under my desk…
Welcome, Princess Kitten!
Not to be outdone by her older brother, Princess Kitten insisted on starting a blog of her own:
I have given them a section of my blogroll. If you are interested, they would both love to have you drop by and read their stories. Chickenfoot is writing in the “fractured fairytale” vein, at least for now, while Kitten’s tales tend toward animal adventures.
This teacher’s opinion: It certainly beats those dreaded “Pretend you’re a pencil” essays!
Welcome to Chickenfoot!
My ds has opened his own blog, and he has some funny stories to tell. The first one is now posted at:
…with more to follow soon. I hope you enjoy them!
And if any of you homeschooling families have students with blogs, I am sure he would enjoy hearing from them. He could use some links for his blogroll.
