The Texts in Elementary Classrooms

Causation is not correlation

Studying statistics makes your brain a foggy haze of numbers, at least to me it does.  This was a link I liked to make numbers a little more entertaining to me.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kjh2110/the-10-most-bizarre-correlations

Meme that's me.

StrengthsFinder 2.0

This book was recommended to me by my sister and we have two copies of it on our bookshelf.  My husband and I have both taken the test and written our strengths in the inside book jacket.  

We've compared our strengths, which are very different than one another.  In fact, we don't have any overlapping ones, which was a conversation in itself.  When you buy this book it comes with access to an online test which gives you a report at the end.  The book chapters detail each strength.  

If you like self-help books, leadership and management theories, and psychology, get this book.  I loved it.  

LOL

Handwriting

Handwriting has always been an interesting thing to me.  I can recall consciously changing mine in fourth grade because I wanted more loopy letters and later changing mine in seventh for a more sophisticated slant.

This New York Times article reviews a few studies about the value we place on handwriting and what the skill really teaches.

A quote I liked said, "Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1

Minecraft App

If my boys had their way one of these would be our next Christmas card photo.  There's this new app that takes any picture on your phone and adds minecraft faces on top, then you resave it as a new .jpeg.  My phone is always full of them.  

Gotta love kids.  

Powerful Single Stories

I just love TED talks.  This one about The Danger of a Single Story got my attention as a researcher and as an avid lover of storytelling.  19 minutes of time well spent.

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story#t-399884

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