On Teaching and Learning: Scrapbook July August 2026

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

Scrapbook

Best ice age trail segments -
Travel Inspiration. I am a huge fan of walking a long distance with friends or family. It’s intensely bonding. Ideally you walk about 100 km, for six days, with comfy lodging at an inn with a meal every night, cafes along the way, carrying only a daypack, with your luggage forwarded. This is not camping, not backpacking! Walking with no gear is so very civilized. I’ve done these kinds of memorable walks all over the world. The easiest way to start is to follow a route supplied by the outfitter MacsAdventure, who will arrange the lodging and luggage forwarding, and give you a route to follow on your phone app, for very reasonable costs. You choose when you want to go. My recommendations for two easy-to-do, highly rewarding walks are the Cotswold Loop in England, and the Coastal El Camino in Portugal. Either one will give you an easy, memorable trip. Sign up with some friends or family. — KK
Trekking poles - These no-name $26 Covacure Trekking Poles are a bargain and pretty typical of the class: lightweight aluminum, unfold in a second, and are very rigid. You can get featherweight carbon fiber if you want to pay more. — KK
Madison Area

Teaching idea: give kids cards on the way to class with different tone words and then show a painting like nighthawks and have them find evidence to show that it’s true.
Then do the same thing with poems in the next unit
For teaching: move the art analysis to Wednesday and include a breakdown of the previous weeks. Exit slip on Wednesday.
Wednesdays can also be the direct teaching days of PowerPoint, like movies and characterization in the iceberg
Next steps set up AP skill for each story or week and poem
Text as Music is a simple browser tool where you paste your writing and it colors every sentence by length, so you can literally see the rhythm on the page. Micro sentences turn one color, short another, and medium and long each have their own. It’s inspired by Gary Provost’s line, “Don’t just write words. Write music.”
Shakespeare Word Invention* Tim Urban has Shakespeare-invented words that are linked to specific passages. Here's the link to the website he took it from.

Dave's Blog Index that was preparation for a book idea. It has blog links for several years by topic
First Draft is my attempt at the same. This must have taken hours and hours of work. It's 116 pages of an outline of many chapters (it's incomplete) using the blog index as a guide. I don't know where the full outline is -- may my journal?

For each of my areas like garden or office have two things going on a list of chores and a list of a project that I’m working on

Arepas - link; Another arepas recipe here
I update 10 Common Recipes with places for grains, beans, air fryer, ferments, dressings.

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