Mythology and the Fourth Grade

This past week has been a crazy one.  From teaching the students about fractions, to having them take the SBAC math ad reading tests on the laptops, it all became a lot to handle.  With all of the crazyness going on, one of the best moments came when I  introduced mythology to my class.  Believe it or not, this allowed for some comic relief between the kids and I, and we all needed it.  This is my second year teaching mythology, but last year was kind of a whirlwind because of all the changes with the Common Core.  This year we acquired some really great mentor texts!  The book that I selected to read to the class first was great because it talked about the purpose of mythology, and began with the story of how the mythological world was created with the Greek gods and goddesses.  The comic relief came when I began to read the story about Gaea, who was mother Earth and the goddess of the early Greek gods,  and Uranus, the god of the sky.  Gaea and Uranus had some children, and some of them turned out to by cyclopes and monsters with 50 arms and 50 legs.  Uranus banished those children to the underworld, but Gaea was not happy about that.  Gaea encouraged her other son Cronus to rescue his brothers, but he left his brothers down in the underworld and took over his dad, Uranus, and banished him from Earth.  Now the part that gets interesting is that Cronus ends up marrying one of his sisters.  My students were very confused and disgusted by this, but after reassuring them that this is a fictional story, they were able to laugh about it.  I was new to this story, so I did not see that one coming.  Then, the story goes on to say that Cronus ate his children because he did not want them to overpower him, like what he did to his dad.  In the end Cronus's children ended up living, and they defeated their father in a battle.  I think my students were relieved by this! I can't wait until the next Greek myth!

Getting the Ball Rolling

I am getting closer to starting up my classroom blog. I decided a while ago that I wanted to use it for math, but with everything that we have going on in school, it has been difficult to find the time to get started.  The thing is, I know this blog will be a great learning experience for all of the students, so I really need to get it going. I created an account with Kidblog the other day. This seems to be the most secure sight to use.  I like that I will be able to approve the students' posts before they get published.  Right now I am in the process of making a permission slip to sent out to parents.  I think I am going to use the backwards approach and ask the parents to contact me if they do not agree with blogging, instead of having them let me know if it is okay for their child to blog.  Once I have my permission slip approved by my administrator, I will send it out and then get the blog started.  I am predicting that it may take a while for the students to get use to the format of the blog. I am sure I will have to review it a couple of times, however, they are like sponges so they might be able to understand it faster than I could! Wish us luck!

Twitter

Today I got help from some of my awesome classmates in #584! They showed me how to put Twitter on my blog. Viewers of my blog can now see the posts I have made on Twitter, and they can also click a button to follow me. In order to do this I had to Twitter first and get the embed code under settings. I had to create a widget to get the embed code. Then, I had to copy and paste the code to a gadget on my blog. I clicked the "Java Script" option under the gadget and just like magic my Twitter account was connected to my blog! About a month ago the words widget, gadget, and blog weren't even in my vocabulary. Thanks everyone!