Sometimes...

...ideas just pop into my head and I literally shriek in excitement.

And scare my students while they are working hard, breaking up the nice and quiet sound of 7th graders thinking critically.

It happened today.  They looked at me like I was crazy.  I might be.

If you have been anywhere near Facebook or Instagram in the last few days you have probably noticed the little stick figures that give "worldly" advice about what you should and should not do based on a silly little name generator thingy.  They come from a site called "Blobla"  I put my name into it and got this.

Click here to make your own!

Then, being the smart-ass that I am, I decided to use this "template" as a humorous way to convince my 7th graders during Target Time (study hall) to actually use the time to get homework finished before having to do it at home.  (The actual point of the 27 minutes they get everyday.)

So I drew this up on my board.

They loved it.

And then, somewhere between posting it on Instagram and returning to the stack of essays I needed to grade, an idea just popped in my head.

Why not use this template as an assignment for 8th graders to summarize a person from history that we have studied.  BAM!

Students would have to create a "Be like Bob" picture using historical information.  I could also give them a choice of creating a "Don't be like Bob" option.

I created an example on my iPad using Keynote and the Sketchpad.  I do this because if I'm going to ask the students to do something, I'm going to do it first!  (And because it is WAY MORE FUN than grading essays.)

I think we will try this out next week.  We just finished our study of Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act.  These could be good!  I'll let you know how they turn out :)