Saturday, September 26

Today is Saturday of Week 5... and I hope you are having a nice weekend! Here is a link to Week 5, and also a link to Week 6 if you are ready to get a head start on the week to come.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. I had a few items left in the stack on Friday afternoon, and those projects will be at the top of the stack on Monday. Meanwhile, I'll update the stack periodically over the weekend so you can check to make sure I received your project.

And THANK YOU to everybody who has their project website up and running now: it is really exciting to see those take shape this semester. I'll keep updating the project lists and the slideshow next week as more projects keep coming in!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Stream. It's been so much fun seeing the different designs and art that people are using for their Storybooks. For example, check out Terry's The Peach Blossom Fairyland. The image is definitely setting the mood here!


Twitter stream. One of my favorite things about Twitter is seeing lovely works of art from India; here's a painting of Rama and his brothers arriving at the court of King Janaka:


And I thought this was hilarious: hypnotic llama!


Storybook. And here's a beautiful Storybook of Central American mythology: Huitzilli's Journey.


100-Word Stories. And here's an Aesop's fable about a cat and a fox on a journey together: Cat and Fox, Philosophers.


And here's an idea for writing stories without words at all: Literojis! 


To celebrate the European Day of Languages (see below), the European Word Translator is a mash-up using Google Translate. You type a word into the "Translate it!" box, and then the translations show up on the map for the language of each country, and you can hover over each word to see what language it is.


Plus here's another language graphic, a linguistic family tree drawn by Minna Sundberg, and here is a larger version:


And here's a video about mythical languages from Crash Course:


September 26: European Day of Languages. You can find out more about this holiday at Wikipedia and at the EDL website. Celebrate the holiday by practicing your European language skills: English and beyond. For me, that means I will be singing along to Italian and Polish pop music. Maybe you can find a fun way to use your languages today!


A blast from the Polish past with Lady Pank; it has the Polish lyrics with an English translation:


And an Italian favorite: the late, great Fabrizio de Andre. You can see the Italian lyrics and English translation here.



Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.
Labels: ,