Last night I ran across a show about  Leonardo da Vinci. Learned about things he did I had no clue about. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if he came to visit Room 36?”

Pretty sure he’s not immediately available, but what if we could recreate a little bit of his aura…and his genius?

Of course, fitting this idea into our hallowed schedule and curriculum…well.

So this morning, I marched around the room and plopped new notebooks in front of each student. The usual reactions… “We’re already writing enough!”  “I’m not done with the one you gave me!”  “I don’t like green. Can’t I have one with a blue cover?”. 

I explained the codex would follow them around everywhere [well, almost everywhere…thank you, Beth, for the suggestion that the rest room wouldn’t be appropriate.]—the classroom, our activities outside, our offsite trips.

As expected, using that new word set some kids off. After I talked about Leonardo’s notebooks came the question:

“Can’t we just use an iPad?” [Beth…again.]

I reminded her we don’t have one for everybody, but I loved the idea of incorporating them further into what I called, off the top of my head, ‘our classroom codex’. This sent them into all manner of disequilibrium. [one of our ‘words of the week’, thank you very much.]

More later. Time for a latte and cookies in Mr. Taylor’s classroom.