Score!

I've been a fan of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series since the first book (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief) was published. I started subscribing to his blog on my reader this summer and learned that he was giving away class sets of T-shirts. The T-shirts (and his offer) are described here.

Today was the first day we were allowed to go to school, so I went and dropped off a ton of stuff I had purchased this summer--composition books, 48 boxes of crayons, etc. When I entered my classroom, I saw a large box with the Penguin publishing logo on it. It was a box of 30 T-shirts! Yippee!!--I feel like I won the lottery. Rick's a former classroom teacher, so he knows how much this will be appreciated. It definitely made my day!

We're changing science series this year, and Tennessee has adopted new, more rigorous standards for Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science. Necessarily, I've spent a lot of time looking at the new series and searching for ways I need to adapt to be ready for the coming school year. One thing I've found is ISNs--Interactive Student Notebooks--and I will be using ISNs for Science and Social Studies.

What is an ISN? Well, the best answer is perhaps found here, at Mr. Saunders' site. The interactivity comes from the products students produce related to the daily notes they take. It will be more work for me, because I don't think I can create notes very well "on the fly", but I think it may provide my students, especially my inclusion students, with the support they need to succeed. I still have some questions about grading (some worksheets will be necessary, I think) and I worry that I won't be doing enough to turn the learning over to them--I'm a great one for jumping in and telling the answer. But, I'm going to tuck in my chin, buy 100 composition notebooks, and figure this out as I go along.

Other helpful sites I've found regarding ISNs are:

• an interactive notebook wikispace
• a discussions at ProTeacher here, here, and here
• Mrs. Heaton's blog, where she writes extensively and uses lots of pictures to show everyone her ideas on ISNs