#betweenartandquarantine

My daughter inspired me to participate in the Instagram phenomenon of recreating a favorite piece of art while at home. On my first trip to the National Gallery of Art in college days I brought home a half dozen prints of my favorite artworks. This is one of them; Edouard Manet's "The Dead Toreador." Pretty fun thing to do!

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York. Sanborn Map Company, Sep, 1885. Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, .

For years and years I have been hauling out a piecemeal taped-composite photocopy of the Afton Historical Society's Sanborn Fire Insurance 1885 Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
I am delighted to report that it is online at the LOC along with similar maps from 1891 and 1897!

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
September 1885
https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05722_001/

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
July 1891
https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05722_002/

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
March97
https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05722_003/

Interaction with Class of 2021

Hosting some 11th grade ELA projects. Book display to support their content by ACSLIB.

Mural mock-ups

Came across a couple folders with many of the silhouettes and research notes from our 2009 Wildlife Hallway project. Put them up on the bulletin board for another moment in the sun. #proud

Poblem-solving

Working up a rough-draft of a larger scale map on which to plot school house from our pre-centralized school district.

NYS School Districts

https://andyarthur.org/google-maps-ny-school-districts.html

A group of students are researching the history of our school. Yesterday they hosted the town historian to ask about our consolidation from fifteen "school houses" to our present central school. They hope to plot the location of these school houses within our current district map.

One question they hoped to resolve was the general distance a student would have had to travel to reach an available school. Which got me thinking about how that pans out today across the state.

This nifty map-mosaic at andyarthur.org does a nice job of giviing me a ballpark answer.

Paving the way

Our school announced plans last week for an after-school activity program for students featuring staff coverage for homework help, a LEGO room, yoga, and STEM projects. You were there first with ATCI, Abby and Dominic; ahead of your time.

Video version of my lesson for 4th graders

First-time video

A student introduction to creating a video began with staging a variety of about 20 assorted shots without a story line. The student then created a "story" from the pool of available takes. As a final version, he labeled the type of camera shots; establishing his knowledge of these building blocks and their usefulness.

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Subsequently, he has created a voice-over video based on a very structured script about kitchen safety. In this project, the challenge was quality control and attention to detail; not fun, but a useful rehearsal for the expectation of any job.

Planning your next move

Chess is one of the cornerstones of the middle school experience in this library. It seems they all play. I believe it is a constructive use of time; cultivating their faculties of visualization, planning, reflection, resilience.
This recent Vimeo video of elementary students reflecting on the benefits of chess says it all:

The Magic of Chess from Jenny Schweitzer Bell on Vimeo.

Fly-Thru

The architects for our next school building project sent along some fly-thru videos of their proposals. It brought to mind the fly-overs Middle School students created in the library with SketchUp back in 2013 or so. #proud

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Allowing each other to contribute

Doing some project-brainstorming with my Period E class; can we build on a suggestion? can we visualize tasks, possibilities, outcomes? who might be a resource, stakeholder? who are we teaching with our research? what will me make to demonstrate what we are learning: videos, flash cards, exhibits, games, mock-ups, events?

And, importantly, do I sense a willingness and enthusiasm to embrace this opportunity as their own?

DDD on Map Warper

NYPL Map Warper

I followed up on a NYPL tweet about their Map Warper service. It's very cool!

Using their huge collection of digitized maps and atlases, you can "rectify" historic maps so they align with current ones. This is done in side-by-side windows by indicating a number of mutual "control points".

The results can be output in several formats, including as a .kml file which popped open my Google Earth program and nested itself over the aligned landscape. Cool!

Virtual/Actual shelf-browse, sort of

Figure I'll email HS students images of selected shelves to encourage some virtual-to-actual shelf browsing. Here is my SciFi stack!

Or maybe bookmarks:

Engaging history with Portraits

I followed up on a Syracuse Stage postcard I received; leading me to Robert Shetterly's portrait project, Americans Who tell the Truth. Although he is basically looking to sell us something, the concept of rendering a portrait, that close reading, as a first step in discovering and investigating an "historic" person holds real promise for a classroom project. I see there are some lesson plans posted. I look forward to brainstorming on this a bit more, maybe even doing some of our own "historic" students, alumni, etc.

A physics-based look at the Johnstown Flood

Some one had been reading about the Johnstown Flood and left David McCullough's fine book on one of our library tables. I remember being enthralled as I read it years ago. It prompted me to see if there were any 3D geographic renderings of it online.

I was delighted to find this "physics-based simulation of it: https://youtu.be/tMc9kP9q-d8

Today

Switched out my key fob today.  Made 'em both.

Reacting to the Past

I was led to this site by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Reacting" is a role-playing curriculum at the college level to promote engagement with big ideas, employ collaborative skills, and inhabit the historical moment in all its context. Although it might not fly at the HS level, the idea of immersing students in the dynamics of an historical moment by having them be historical characters in it sounds awfully good. Perhaps a good PD visit for one of our staff.

Leveraging rocks

The identity rocks that our K-12 painted together are looking great at the school entrance.

I made a composite David Hockney-esque long poster from their image and am using it to support some school initiatives; like attendance.

Installed outside the Elementary Office!

Cutting out a bunch of individual rock messages to post also.