All I can really add to the conversation is to humbly provide recommendations for books I connected with this year. I’ve tried to filter out some of the great books you probably know about (Wonder, Green, etc.), unless they particularly resonated with me. Some months have more books than others, because some months I read more than others. You can tell when I was finishing my National Boards.

I didn’t consciously chose to include more nonfiction than most lists I’ve seen, but I do want to point out how important I think it is to highlight more traditional expository writing. YES, lyrical nonfiction books are fantastic, but we do a disservice to our kids when we aren’t seeking out good books of the type they’ll encounter when they’re doing research, even if they’re not as thrilling for us to read.

I owe a lot to the book recommendations from Nerdy Book Club folks who I’ve given shout-outs below.

I’ve included children’s books and adult books, and not all of them were published this year. Images were either created by me or swiped from GoodReads.

• I.M. Pei: Architect of Time, Place, and Purpose, Jill Rubalcaba
• Bone Dog, Eric Rohmann
• Vintage Fashion: Collecting and Wearing Designer Classics, 1900-1990, Emma Baxter-Wright

• Tiger Math: Learning to Graph from a Baby Tiger, Ann Whitehead Nagda

• The One and Only Ivan, Katherine Applegate
• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin
• C. R. Mudgeon, Leslie Muir

TRUTH TIME. I actually like the trailer for C. R. Mudgeon better than the book itself. Do yourself a favor and watch (or rewatch) Julian Hector’s work:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu0S7k1K-LY"]

• Look Back in Anger, John Osborne
• The Fault in Our Stars, John Greene
• Forgive Me, I Meant To Do It: False Apology Poems, Gail Carson Levine

• An Awesome Book, Dallas Clayton
• Here Come the Girl Scouts!, Shana Corey
• See You at Harry’s, Jo Knowles
• Captain Disaster, Jenni Holm

• Auntie Yang’s Great Soybean Picnic, Ginnie Lo
• Infinity and Me, Kate Hosford
• American Hip Hop: Rappers, DJs, and Hard Beats, Nathan Sacks
• The Mysterious Howling, Maryrose Wood
• Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed the Seas, Molly Bang & Penny Chisholm
• A Leaf Can Be…, Laura Purdie Salas

Watch me pimp out The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place on Mr. Sharp’s Nerdbery video:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qdRAFydaqg"]

• Touch the Sky: Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper, Ann Malaspina
• Buckyworks: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today, J. Baldwin
• Chuck Close: Face Book, Chuck Close
• Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Lisa Delpit
• Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, Ellen Ullman. Recommended by Robin Sloan.

• Invincible Microbe: Tuberculosis and the Never-Ending Search for a Cure, Jim Murphy & Alison Blank
• The Haitian Earthquake of 2010, Peter Benoit
• Creep and Flutter: The Secret World of Insects and Spiders, Jim Arnosky
• Liberty Rising: The Story of the Statue of Liberty, Pegi Deitz Shea

• Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, Ursula Nordstrom. Recommended by Laurel Snyder.
• Sacre Bleu: a Comedy d’Art, Christopher Moore. Recommended by Tom Morse.
• Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, Mo Willems
• One for the Murphys, Lynda Mullaly Hunt
• The Gentleman Bug, Julian Hector

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The False Prince, Jennifer Nielsen

• Bitterblue, Kristin Cashore
• This Is Not My Hat, Jon Klassen
• Child of the Mountains, Marilyn Sue Shank
• Cowboys Count, Monkeys Measure, and Princesses Problem Solve, Jane Wilburne
• Annie and Helen, Deborah Hopkinson

• Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones. Discovered because Paul O. Zelinsky illustrated her recent book.
• The Mystery of the Blue Ring, Patricia Reilly Giff
• The Seven Tales of Trinket, Shelley Moore Thomas

Phew! What a year! I eagerly await your input on these selections.

I know sound, math, and science are all suuuuuuper tight. What I don’t know is how to adequately organize my sound unit so it includes great inquiry-based investigations. My guiding framework is an annnnncient curriculum from the National Science Resources Center (published when I was in junior high) that has such profound extension activities as the one featured below:

Ugh. Not helpful. It’s worth noting that there are a whopping two math extension activities in this entire unit.

The wise and enthusiastic Katie Weichert gave me some great ideas to chew on and think about. I wish I saw her more often. But in her absence, I had to get a move on.

So I started trolling the Internet.

This Aztec music lesson seems compelling.

I’m also interested in harmonics, but I don’t know how to build this into a full lesson. My students already use harmonic series as a procedure to line up from music class, so I wouldn’t need to go over the basic musical idea of third and fifth intervals.

THIS could be useful. It appears to be a sound generator. Could I have kids compose a song using fractions and then convert them to their frequencies? Speaking of composing music…

I imagine I could show snippets from Donald in Mathmagic Land and have students generate questions from that? Yesssssss, I could totally do that… That way the learning would be authentic and related to the curriculum we already have in place!

My only concern remains starting with a video. I want to make sure I’m looking for an introduction that inspires perplexity, not just engagement. After the 27-minute video was released in 1959, Walt Disney admitted:

“The cartoon is a good medium to stimulate interest. We have recently explained mathematics in a film and in that way excited public interest in this very important subject.”

(emphasis is my own) Now in looking at moving from merely interest to investigation…… I suppose that recording student questions will take care of that fear, right? Then having their questions shape the following lessons?

Hmmmmm. Of course, there are a wealth of videos available on sound and math, but much of the information is so complex that I can’t figure out how to simplify it.

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0"]

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_Us6xHkUc&list=UUOGeU-1Fig3rrDjhm9Zs_wg&index=17&feature=plcp"]

I’m also interested in looking at the materials used in instrument strings and the number of strings included in different instruments. How do the number of notes an instrument is capable of producing related to its system? Can systems be different sizes? Is a larger system necessarily “better” or more “complete?”

Anyway. Let’s see how this goes.

When you take time for yourself, good things follow. In this case, it was some REALLY AWESOME MATH.

Friday morning, I missed the bus (oops) and was able to drive to work at a legal speed.

I had an opportunity to drink some nummy nummy coconut mocha coffee and read my Wall Street Journal. And lookie what I found!

The art of the slow-motion soccer goal.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dan Meyer commenting on how we spoon feed each step to a problem solving situation, and so today, I went out on a skinny limb and used this graphic to help us work on our measurement skills. I wasn’t sure where our work would take us, but we’re early on in the unit, so many of my students are still working to measure accurately using a ruler.

I showed them the graphic, and Samuel helped me pronounce all the players’ names. He was our resident expert. Then I opened the floor to mathematical questions.

Here’s what we brainstormed as our big questions.

 The questions with green dots to the left are the ones we decided to pursue.

Then, people started asking more “nitty-gritty” questions, which we identified as being the “questions along the way” you had to answer to get to your big ideas. We kept this poster up as we worked. I stayed near my computer so I could capture students’ comments.

“You need to know how big the field is,” Savanah spoke up. I handed her my iPad so she could find the field size. She paused. “Do I need to know like, how BIG it is or how long the sides are?”  “I think you’re asking me whether you need the area or the perimeter?” “Yeah… ohhhh, I need the length of the sides.” Here’s the information she found.

After checking another site to verify the accuracy of her information, we added the dimensions of the field to the poster. (Yes, I know I could have taken a screen shot of the iPad, and I did, but I couldn’t get the image sent to my computer. Hrmph.)

“But what’s a yard?” “Who can answer that?” “It’s three feet,” Ivy answered. “How can you check to see if you agree?” “Well, I could look in my math book, but I remember what yard sticks last year look like, and I know there are three rulers.” (I knew we’d need to convert from yards to feet to inches so they’d be able to convert the lengths they measured on their papers into the actual lengths)

“Well, then you need to multiply by three to get the length – 120 times three.” “Woah. How’re we going to do that?” “Use a known fact, 12 x 3.” “36?” “Yeah, 36.” “So it’s 360 feet.”

They did the same for the other side. Then a group of students wanted to determine the linear distance the ball traveled for each player. I asked how many inches long their picture was, and Marcos stopped us all.

Marcos: WAIT. You blew up the picture from your newspaper article. So our picture isn’t the same size as yours and the distances will be all different. (I photocopied the graphic at 121% so it’d be easier to read than my original copy of the newspaper.)

Me: Nice. That would be a problem if the image were STRETCHED like a rubber band and warped, but since it was enlarged to scale, we’ll be okay AS LONG AS you don’t let me use my original copy, okay?”

Marcos: Okay. So the field is 11 inches long.

“You know, if they would have just included a map scale on this picture, we wouldn’t have to do ANY of this measurement.” “I guess that’s why Miz Houghton wants us to be able to use map scales in social studies.”

Then a few of us worked to create this poster.

We knew the field was 11 inches in our image, but we wanted to know how far just ONE inch would be because then we could find out how far Jone Samuelson’s 6-inch kick actually went. We also knew how long an actual field was, so we tried to find the relationship between the two.

Using a fact family (the triangle drawn above) helped us figure out the ratio. Or. What I initially THOUGHT was the ratio. DO YOU SEE MY GLARING ERROR??? I didn’t notice until lunch. I neglected to convert the 240 feet into inches so the units matched. Drat. I frantically called AP Calculus teacher James Brown to make sure I didn’t make any further errors.

So after lunch we converted 240 feet into inches, THEN used the ratio and found out that one inch in our picture equalled approximately 33 feet.

Some students switched to using calculators for these larger computations, which gave us a chance to talk about how calculators represent 1/2, equivalent fractions (5/10), etc. Above, Alejandra calculated how many feet David Villa kicked the ball (5 inches, according to her measurements, making the kick 165 feet). I asked her about the “33 in. in a inch” she wrote, and she said, “Oh no no no, it’s not 33 INCHES or that would be like a mini soccer field.” So she was also looking at reasonableness of answers.

Another group wanted to know how far the balls would have gone if they were kicked on the moon. Again, I told them to ignore the parabolic motion and just look at linear distance. I know the physics of this aren’t entirely correct, but I didn’t think it  hurt the integrity of the original problem situation.

Oh, actually! Selam originally asked how far the ball would go in SPACE, but Maya pointed out that if the they were in space, the player and ball would both push off each other and the ball would never land (AMAZING INSIGHT, RIGHT???). So we clarified that the ball would be kicked on the moon, where there was still a force acting on the ball, but a lesser force than what we’d find on Earth.

Adam went to the classroom library to find out what the gravity was on the moon. Here’s the passage he found, from the DK Eyewitness Book UNIVERSE.

Eayn: It says the gravity is one-sixths of Earth!

Me: So the gravity is 1/6 of the gravity on the Earth. So if we are converting from the moon, what would we have to do to the distance we calculated for the ball kicked on Earth?

Adam: Multiply it by three?

Me: Where did you get three from?

Adam: I dunno.

Milena: Multiply it times five.

Me: Five? Where did you get that from?

Milena: If the moon’s gravity is 1/6, then the rest of the fraction that’s left is 5/6.

Me: Ohhh, I think I see what you’re picturing in your head. But think of the gravity on the Earth as being one whole, and the gravity on the moon being 1/6 of that whole. You’re not looking at the other 5/6ths.

Vy: You’d multiply it times six.

Me: Where did you get six from?

Vy: If it’s dividing by six to get the pull on the moon, then you’d multiply by six to show how much further the ball would go when it has a sixth of the gravity slowing it dowwn.

Me: So you’re saying that fractions can be a way of dividing.

Vy: Yep. And then the opposite, er, inverse, is multiplying, so you times by 6.

(It is perhaps worth noting that Vy has not voluntarily spoken in front of the class in the past year and two months)

Wow. So now that we knew how to find distances on Earth and on the moon, we plugged away, with at least three people needing to agree on their measurements to the nearest half-inch before we would post the results. (reviewing our estimation and rounding unit from earlier in the year)

As we approached second recess, we posted what we’d come up with so far.

We also reflected on what we’d learned over the course of the day, and on the math we used.

As you can see, we didn’t finish everything, so some students asked if they could finish the calculations during Math Daily Five. UM, YES OF COURSE.

What suggestions or modifications do you have to offer me and my students? Where can we take things from here? Other thoughts?

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

BONUS! This week also features all sorts of Common Core activity goodies! Wowie!

Bats: A Nature-Fact Book, by D.J. Arneson

At first glance, what a totally inaccessible book. The text is small and dense, there’s no organization, and the book itself is small and not ideal for a mentor text.

BUT! Each page is a different topic, so it’d be really easy to photocopy and enlarge a page, then have students break it apart. You could even do a class jigsaw, with different groups picking different sections. Look! Now you have a complex non-fiction text for students to read deeply, just like Common Core suggests!

Speaking of Common Core, why not extend this lesson and make it 23894678 times more interesting by including this story about a boy who used echolocation because he was blind. AMAZING! There’s a bunch of additional information and resources here. A gent named Dan Kish uses echolocation too:

Congratulations! Now you’ve provided your students with the multimedia resources CCSS encourages.

This book features an !!!OFFICIAL!!! FWPS lesson plan focusing on text features. The book actually doesn’t HAVE nonfiction text features, but the lesson explains that it can then be contrasted with Vampire Bats & Other Creatures of the Night published by Kingfisher. The lesson also encourages students to create their own table of contents for the book.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

• Ask questions throughout the reading process. If you do choose to break this book down into page-long sections, it would be a manageable way to have your students develop questions before, during, and after reading. If you’re using jigsaw groups, you might also have students ask questions of others’ groups, then see if their questions are answered.
• Use text features (titles, headings, captions, graphic features). Explained above in the FWPS !!OFFICIAL!! lesson.

• Use dictionaries, thesauruses, and glossaries as tools. Because there is no glossary included in the text, this might be a good time for a dictionary lesson. Alternatively, you could take the lesson in another direction if your dictionaries aren’t complex enough to include bat-specific terms. In which case you could talk about when it’s faster to look something up online and when it’s faster to use a hard copy dictionary.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Presenting a crash course in the HIGGS-BOSON, as curated by me!

My new favorite YouTube channel is Minute Physics, which I just discovered. YES. Here’s their Higgs explanation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uh5mTxRQcg]

Now. I need to be honest with you. I love Vi Hart deeply, but it has come to my attention that her assertion that the Higgs Boson accounts for “missing mass” in critters like us (and pigs) is incorrect. So although I revere her enthusiasm for the discovery, I need to tell you she’s off the mark on this one.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qzqIHj4uGI]

But like I said, her enthusiasm is contagious:

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/220717687058337793"]

Another piece that isn’t quite accurate, but IS humorous.

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/FakeScience/status/221251643025534976"]

You can listen to Ira Flatow talk about the Higgs discovery on Science Friday. I met him at MSU. He was kind of a douche.

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/hroot/status/221319534307573760"]

I love TED. I love hot scientists. Yesssss.

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/TED_ED/status/220961869316358144"]

And here’s another Brian Cox explanation:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPoxewA-URo]

This is my favorite analogy of all time, from John Ellis:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG8g5JW64BA]

You can see the full announcement of the Higgs discovery here. I originally mentioned that I hadn’t seen any women speaking about the announcement, but Chip pointed out that the decidedly female Fabiola Gionatti is in charge of ATLAS, which along with CMS is analyzing all the detrius that the LHC spits out.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJZPS5HzB4Q]

I always can appreciate a good rap. Here’s an overview of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM]

And here’s what happens at the LHC. Brought to you by Chip Brock, who as I mentioned yesterday has been a TREMENDOUSLY generous resource.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdvVaC9HlKI]

Chip is also helping me work on my own explanation, as I’ve received feedback from several people that the above explanations aren’t clear/basic enough. Fingers crossed I can create something comprehensible. Although by the time I post it, people probably won’t be excited about the Higgs any more. Which is a shame.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3-4Ez7Kc-o]

In my musings, I owe much gratitude to Chip Brock, who has always been willing to answer my random, rapid-fire e-mail questions. My lifetime favorite question is probably when I sent him a message from my internship at The Gazette in Colorado Springs asking how much pressure it would take to blast off a manhole cover. Yessssss.

I owe a lot in advance to Kendra Snyder, who is a science publicist for the American Museum of Natural History. I say “in advance” because I plan on picking her brain plenty in the future, although before yesterday, I hadn’t seen her since we graduated together from MSU in May 2005. Which is an absolutely tragedy, because she is brilliant and wonderful. We didn’t hang out much outside of SNews functions at MSU and our sweet 2003 study abroad, which is a shame.

I was trying to figure out yesterday morning, as I was brain barfing to Kendra, why my passionate interest in lay-person’s science advocacy has been on the sidelines for so long. Maybe it’s because I’ve found science-loving friends in Toby’s coworkers at Cheezburger who made me think that the rest of the world was more into science these days. Maybe I was lulled into a false sense that science was becoming more widely recognized because of popular shows like Mythbusters and Alton Brown’s Good Eats.

But I’m probably really thinking about how most people respond to science because of the reaction most people have when I tell them I’m writing a children’s book about Buckminster Fuller. There are three main forms these reactions take. I am including photos for ease of interpretation.

1) Delight. “OMG Awesome! The geodesic dome! Buckyballs! What are you writing about him?”

2) Dismissiveness. “Oh, SHANNON, you’re such an overachiever. Don’t even tell me, I know I wouldn’t understand.”

3) That Look. “That Look” also goes along with “That Voice,” the tone that people use when they talk about science being beyond their grasp. You’ve heard every single TV and radio personality using “That Voice” when they lead into a story about the Higgs discovery. It’s oftentimes meant as a compliment, I’m sure, like “Now we’ll hear from a brilliant person who understands the mysteries of the universe,” but I actually take it as an insult. When you use That Voice and give me That Look, here’s what I actually think: If I am failing to communicate in a lucid way how certain processes work, you are actually calling me an incomprehensible jerk incapable of communicating clearly.

I don’t want you to tell me I’m smart; I want you to ask me questions so I can help you understand too! I want you to be able to see the beauty and majesty and wonder in how science shows us how the world is put together.

How can we get people to be more comfortable and interested in science, especially in a time when NASA funding is nonexistent, education is floundering, and there’s a gross permeating feeling of anti-intellectual sentiment that I can only seem to shake when I’m with the brilliant educators they keep tucked away in the district office?

Well, I can tell you one strategy that probably WON’T work:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA]

I’ll be continuing to ponder this further. But for now, I’ll leave you with inspiring words from Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who actually works out of the American Natural History Museum and might have been in THE EXACT SAME BUILDING AS I WAS yesterday.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akek6cFRZfY]

I know that no book list can be exhaustive. I tried to include mostly titles that you wouldn’t necessarily find if you ran a basic library search for “plants” unless they’re excellent (like How a Plant Grows, which is brilliant). I’ve also sorted them from most recently published to older, because I know my science curriculum does a pretty good job of covering classic kids’ books about plants (i.e. Aliki’s Corn is Maize).

What am I missing? Tell me in the comments!

Emergent Readers

And ANOTHER thing. Really quick. I hate it when curricula are like “here are some books for beginning readers” and I get them and I’m like NO WAY are these a good fit for my beginning readers. So most of the books in this section are wordless or have less than a sentence on each page. For real.

A Leaf Can Be, Laura Purdie Salas (2012)

The Conductor, Laetitia Devernay (2012)

Ava’s Poppy, Marcus Pfister (2012)

The Big Seed, Arthur Geisert (2012)

Green, Laura Vaccaro Seeger (2012)

Rah, Rah, Radishes!, April Pulley Sayre (2011)

Green Beans, Potatoes, And Even Tomatoes, Brian P. Cleary (2010)

Farm, Elisha Cooper (2010)

How a Plant Grows, Bobbie Kalman (1997)

Grade-level Readers

Citizen Scientists, Loree Griffin Burns (2012)

Auntie Yang’s Great Soybean Picnic, Ginnie Lo (2012)

C.R. Mudgeon, Leslie Muir (2012)

Living Sunlight, Molly Bang & Penny Chisholm (2009)

People Need Plants!, Mary Dodson Wade (2009). EVERY BOOK IN THIS SERIES (Plants Grow!, Flowers Bloom!) IS EXCEPTIONAL.

Uno’s Garden, Graeme Base (2006)

My Light, Molly Bang (2004)

Mathematickles!, Betsy Franco-Feeney (2003)

The Bee Tree, Patricia Polacco (1998)

Tops & Bottoms, Janet Stevens (1995)

Advanced Readers / Read Alouds

The Plant Hunters, Anita Silvey (2012)

Ocean Sunlight, Molly Bang & Penny Chisholm (2012)

The Camping Trip that Changed America, Barb Rosenstock (2012)

First Garden, Robbin Gourley (2011)

Grow Great Grub, Gayla Trail (2010)

Mama Miti, Donna Jo Napoli (2010)

The Huckabuck Family, Carl Sandburg (1999)

The Legend of the Bluebonnet, Tomie dePaola (1996)

Look! PlantBooksShoppingList! Click and download! Then you can get ALL OF THE BOOKS!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuiQvPLWziQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9OfdV8KTrM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05qDIjKevJo

We’ve been having a great time.

In addition to seeing all the fabulous animals, we also met up with Greg from the education department, who taught us about plant and animals and how they survive with each other. Here we are on our way to visit the komodo dragon.

He also showed us the tapir, the orangutan, the lion-tail macaque, and the siamang.

My group observed the jaguar walking like it was modeling on a catwalk!

My group of eight students (so well-behaved! Wheeee!) went to one of the aviaries where we saw birds less than three feet away from us.

The weather was ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS, and whenever we got cold we were able to go to an indoor exhibit.

Not all the animals were exotic. In fact, we all enjoyed hanging out with the enormous chubby squirrels.

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

I Wonder… About the Sky, by Enid Field

This is an older book, and it seems like it’s out of print, but our bookroom has a copy, so let’s go with it. I think it can anchor a couple of pretty critical thinking skills. Consider pairing it with one of these resources:

Wonderopolis. The name pretty much speaks for itself.

I Wonder Why… New series on our local NPR station.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

• Ask questions throughout the reading process. This is pretty self-explanatory. The entire book starts with “I wonder…” and then some element about the sky or weather. For example: 
• Predict what will happen, use text to confirm. I notice that often when I make KWL charts with my students, we neglect to follow up on them. (whoops) Consider copying a few of the pages, posting them around the classroom (or the hallway — the photographs are pretty neat), then letting students add answers or new learning as they find them.

• Use prior knowledge and context to predict and confirm meaning. This would be a good book to use early in the weather science unit because it doesn’t have much technical language, and the pictures are pretty supportive of the text. This might then make a good lead-in for Tomie DePaola’s The Cloud Book.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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