LEARNING MUST BE MEANINGFUL.. AND FUN!

What better way to have students learn than putting meaningful and fun togethter? In my years of teaching I found out fun plays a big part on student engagement. And engagement creates LEARNING. Now, I'm not saying, let's just play like crazy all day and be happy, I'm talking about meaningful learning games that provide that good inspiring pleasure that motivates you to play and learn more.
 If students don’t feel connected to their learning and aren’t enjoying what they’re doing, there is NOT going to be a learning process for them. As teachers we’re always striving to make learning both meaningful and engaging, but in an era of higher standards and greater demands on students (and teachers), sometimes the fun part of student learning goes right out the window.
But there’s good news! It doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, maybe the standards are changing. Yes, maybe the pressure is on. And, yes, maybe we have to rethink our teaching, but I know, there is room for fun, learning CAN be meaningful and fun too. And it’s simple… play learning games in your classroom!
Watch a video about HOW TO SPARK LEARNING 

"I don't read cursive"

Carol Guanella came home from the bookstore with her head still shaking.  She'd gone to the Barnes & Noble in downtown Santa Rosa to buy a friend a gift of the book on the historic victories and principled sacrifices of the University of San Francisco's 1951 football team. Guanella had written down the name of the author and the title: Kristine Setting Clark, “Undefeated, Untied, and Uninvited.”  The mother and grandmother approached a young sales associate, told her she was looking for a particular book and handed her the paper.  “She looked at the note,” Guanella said, “and she said, 'You'll have to read it to me. I don't read cursive.'”
This is a true news article. How crazy is this???
Cursive writing has been removed from the school curriculum in at least two Canadian provinces and over forty U.S. states.That makes me wonder, Will there be a day in the distant future that trying to make sense of cursive writing will be much like how it was for us trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics?

How did cursive originate?

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the invention of the typewriter, professional correspondence was written by hand in cursive, the so called a "fair hand" back then. All clerks in a firm were trained to write "fair hand". In the twentieth century most schools in America taught cursive to their kids. Unfortunately, with the advent of computers, any task which would have once required a "fair hand", is now done using a computer and a printer. Cursive writing is now denounced "out of date" and "obsolete" and they majority of schools now do not teach it.