Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.
You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.
I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:
One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.
Among those teens who have watched MTV’s 16 and Pregnant, 82% think the show helps teens better understand the challenges of teen pregnancy and parenthood and how to avoid it.
– Albert (2010)
Of course, it’s essential to note that, “Teens (46%) say parents most influence their decisions about sex.”
Graphs of the words Montessori and muddle created with Google Ngram.
If you take all the books ever written and draw a graph showing which words were used when, you’d end up with something like Google’s Ngram. Of course I thought I’d chart “Montessori” and “muddle”.
The “Montessori” graph is interesting. It seems to show the early interest in her work, around 1912, and then an interesting increase in interest in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Like with all statistics, one should really be cautious about how you interpret this type of data, however, I suspect this graph explains a lot about the sources of modern trends in Montessori education. I’d love hear someone with more experience thinks.
Visuwords is a great visual dictionary. It not only gives definitions, but shows the links between antonyms, synonyms and etymology.
I plugged in a few of the words from this cycle’s vocabulary lists (parasite, circumnavigate, host, viceroy etc.) and the results were quite neat.
Also, if you double click a word/node it expands to show you the things it’s connected to. This can lead to a quite complex diagram. It would have been great to use it for the word navigator, because it gives a graphic organizer that pretty much covers what we talked about for social world this cycle.
Definition of eukaryote. Notice it links to the word prokaryote (the red line indicates that it's an antonym).
Answer survey questions to better understand your characters in these Character Tests by R.J. Hembree as part of the online Writers’ Village University project (found via GalleyCat).
Sample question from the Character Builder Test (Hembree, 2010).
Building realistic characters is an essential component of writing fiction. The Character Tests are a part of a Character Building Workshop page, which also contains Character Building Tips, character archetypes, and a set of character disorders that help define them.
The challenge that comes with working with something like this is that following archetypes too closely has the potential to lead to cliched writing. This site could be very useful if used with caution. From the site’s creator:
The Character Building Workshop is an independent study of your characters using these online questionnaires. The process of filling out the forms will help you, the writer, learn about your characters on a more in-depth level. Once the questions have been answered, you will know more about the roles your characters play in your story. No longer will they be names on a page; they will become living, breathing beings as you continue writing your story.
—Hembree, 2010)
What if you exchanged countries based on population for land area? So China, which is the most populous country would take the place of Russia, which has the largest area. It would create the intriguing map below (from the wonderful blog, Strange Maps).
World Map if the largest countries had the biggest populations. Map by Frank Jacobs.
While discussing polar exploration, I mentioned the story of Amundsen and Scott’s race for the south pole. The fascinating blog, Letters of Note, has Scott’s last letter, written bit by bit, on the ice, to his wife back home. It starts, “To: my widow.”
Photograph of Scott's (far left) expedition at the South Pole, on 17 January 1912, the day after they discovered Amundsen had reached the pole first. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
P.S. Letters of Note is a great resource for examples of great letter writing.
Tips and links range from how to start a writing bible, to the correct writing posture. I’m partial to tip on how to turn your computer into a typewriter, although it’s something that’s never worked for me:
The free Q10 program will convert your distracting computer into an old-fashioned typewriter–focused by real typing sounds and disconnected from the Internet.
–Boog (2010) in GalleyCat
