Day 10

'Rainbow in the morning , sailors take warning!'
I would have taken a picture but I was talking to my dad about his cattle and his hay-making problems due to rain. There was a lovely rainbow (segment) in the east this morning. I found a picture of a rainbow at sea since I couldn't photograph the one over Starkville.

Despite the bad omen, nothing has gone awry so far today.  We started with ART!  I remembered how long it takes to cut shapes with an Exacto knife. I may need to come in early each day or finish my shapes at home.

We just returned from a tour of the T.K. Martin center. The focus in today's tour was technology. The theme for this summer's children activities was Time travel. The 'bricks' were actually a plastic sheet but the shadows made them look real. I'll keep this in mind for a dance or play background. We also saw how students with speech difficulty,  even very young ones, were trained to use keyboards so they could communicate. I understand that keyboarding will be taught in 2nd grade next year!

The speech boards reminded me of how images can communicate ideas without spoken language. You have to wonder if people will stop studying language one day and allow a picture language and a 'Google translate' reader to be the interpreter when necessary. Also, will the ability to use handwritten messages disappear?  There might be a problem with this in a society without electricity and Internet.  Should we assume these things would be available forever?  It must be 'deep thought' Friday.

Justin Putnam, a former colleague from New Hope, brought us a presentation on formative assessment and gamification. I use most of the things he shared. I need to do MUCH better on NearPod! I use Power Point all the time. I could easily pull my presentations into NearPod. I can see how my students would like using their iPads with NearPod presentations.

In the morning session about board games I learned some Excel features such as how to make a spinner using two columns and a pie chart. In Power Point I learned how to insert a hyperlink to go to another part of my presentation. Before I had only used this for inserting media files and Internet videos or pages.  This will be much better than searching for the slide by dragging through all of them!

Well, it's time for the week-end to begin. OH.... the greatest news today is that Dr. Bracey had her baby boy this morning - right before Art class. We are so excited for her!

Update:  after class I went home right away because a storm was looming in the north. About 30 minutes after I got home Noxubee County was under TWO severe thunderstorm warnings at once. I guess the 'rainbow in the morning' was for real!
Here's a picture of the sky from our house. This photo was actually a different day - but the sky was similar on Friday. Our Friday storm came from the north rather than the south or southwest. We always get a windy spell and big rain when it moves in from the north.  I need to take a class in meteorology so I can identify the clouds. There was definitely lightening and thunder so I know they were 'storm clouds.' I'll remember this the next time I see the rainbow in the morning.