What are these kids learning?

The server at our district office crashed Thursday, which meant we spent all of Friday in the dark ages! Without data, we had no way to: take attendance, input/look at grades, make phone calls (we have IT phones), access our lesson plans, find students, nothing, nada, zip, zero, zilch.

It was fun.

Luckily, because the FCAT is coming soon, I had already started making some critical thinking but "fun" worksheets for the kids. So we did those while I sent text messages to the school secretary.

The first worksheet I had my kids do was Famous First Names of Men. Because it's Black History Month, let me point out a few of the obvious they didn't know (these are directly from the worksheet):

___ Whitney (invented the cotton gin)

___ Robinson (first African American Baseball player)

___ Mandela (first elected South African President)

I'm currently creating a PowerPoint lesson for Monday and Tuesday. It is something I've wanted to do for the last couple of years but just haven't had the time. We are going to talk about influential African American writers and work with some of their texts. I get very excited when I start teaching with Langston Hughes (I just love Simple) and Maya Angelou.

Not to mention, they couldn't get these either:
___ Einstein
___ Lennon
___ Carroll.

They did, however, know Mark Twain and Charles Dickens *sigh of relief*.

...Fiona...