Lesson Inspirations from the Strangest Places

I have a old marble composition notebook. I've been carrying it around with me since 1998 or 1999. Well not carrying it around per se, I don't want you to think that its been in my purse these past 13 years, but its been pretty close.

In this notebook which is rather beat up and stained, smeared, crinkled, dogeared, ripped and taped; I have ideas. Ideas that I get from the strangest places.

My latest obsession is with this one ... I think the image explains why

I saw this in a article on Shine from Yahoo. Usually their articles are fairly useless and contain such fascinating headlines such as "Warning: Cigarettes are Bad for You" or random horribly ungrammatical blog posts.  The rest of the article that this idea came from included ideas about how to waste office supplies and use them as decorations for items that hold other office supplies -- like a pencil holder that has other pencils glued to the outside of it.  So it was mostly useless but fun to read.
 
In this activity: each post-it note contains a fact about a story the class read. The class, as a whole, decided what image to create with their post-its and I'm assuming hours later the image is complete.

Now I doubt that I will ever be able to use this idea in as was originally designed - I share a classroom with have the faculty in my building. So I would choose a different way to implement this.  Either placing the notes on a larger sheet of paper that would be possible to take with me or allow the students to create the outline of a shape rather than a full graphic image.

Along with posting this idea here, I printed out a copy of the image and it is now firmly taped to a previously blank page in my composition notebook.

My notebook contains ideas: pictures like the one above, ill-structured questions, random quotes that I think would make interesting writing prompts, even different ways to approach teaching parts of speech [by function; nouns can be direct objects, indirect objects, etc].

I make it a point to go through this notebook - even now when I can't use many of the ideas, on a regular basis --usually once a month.   Now instead of finding interesting ways to present materials to my middle school students - I give the ideas to my current students who happen to be pre-service teachers.

Maybe next semester I will have my students create their own notebooks and we can make them dual entry processing books. In these books, on the even pages they will post the idea and on the conjoined odd page they can take notes and process the idea further. Several times a semester we can go through these in small groups like a workshop - discussing improvements or twists or takes on them.

See, I get ideas in the strangest places.