e-link December 2008

Information for New ITS
Kathy Adkins

December 2008

gifts

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas,
My true love sent to me
Twelve drummers drumming,
Eleven pipers piping,
Ten lords a-leaping,
Nine ladies dancing,
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five golden rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle-doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree!

A Lesson for Economic Times

MOST EXPENSIVE CHRISTMAS EVE

R AS PNC CHRISTMAS PRICE INDEX JUMPS 8.1 PERCENT IN 2008!

PNC Christmas Price Index is a simple way to introduce economic trends and inflation.

PNC calculates the CPI each year as a fun, lighthearted way to look at the increasing cost of goods and services bought by the “True Love” in the holiday classic, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” This year's interactive offers easy data for students to crunch.

Be sure to check the lesson resources under the educator tab and the games tab for online fun.

Here are two spreadsheets that can be used to crunch data.

Creative Text Tools

Word Clouds can be great discussion starters as well as a tool to assess prior knowledge. You can take any group of words and create a graphic in which the frequency of use of each word can be represented by font size, color and style. Word clouds can be great discussion starters, a way to brainstorm ideas or critique a poem or story. Wordle is a tool, teachers can use to quickly create a word cloud online. OO Writer, Pixie, Fireworks, Kidspiration or Inspiration can be used to create a word cloud with desktop applications.

Black Dog's Christmas Image Maker has many fonts that can create images for a project. Images are saved as .bmps and .pngs. They can easily be copied and pasted into a flipchart on the Promethaean Board. Black Dog's Image Maker is quick and easy to use.

The fonts to the left are:

snow - Snowcaps regular
tree - Xmastree
love - Humbug
Happy Holidays at the bottom of this page - Flakes
- This one you can copy and save for e-mail. You can use Fireworks to save these as a .gif.

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Open Office in the Classroom

Supporting the use of Open Office is important over the next few months. Here are just a few links with lesson ideas. Collaborate with teachers and provide support to make their lessons a success! Share these sites or individual lessons when offering professional development.

Microsoft Lesson Plans

The Daily Lesson Plan at New York Times

Idea Starters at Internet4Classrooms

Read, Write, Think

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Holiday Activities

Winter Holiday Word Magnets

Twelve Holly Days Mad Lib

New Year's Resolution Mad Lib

Holidays with Jan Brett

North Pole

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