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There is an interesting piece in today's New York Times about the expansion of Petrified Forest National Park in north-eastern Arizona.  The park, which began its life as a National Monument under Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, has now been enriched with over 25,000 acres of land formerly belonging to a private ranch.
Negotiations between the Dpt. of the Interior and the owner of this land had been stalled for over a decade.  The reason is that the two parties could not agree to a price.  The ranch's owner, Marvin Hatch, demanded $500 per acre, which would have amounted to over $13 million in total.  When the government refused, Hatch turned the land -- which is especially prized for the abundant dinosaur fossil it contains -- into a private theme park.  Calling it International Petrified Forest, Hatch built a giant concrete dinosaur along I-40 to attract visitors and charge them an entrance fee.  
Hatch has since passed away, and his sons agreed to sell the ranch-land at the reduc…

After reading Betsy Fulweiler's book this summer, I was once again motivated to model, model, model how to write scientific thinking.  She suggests using a class journal as either a class chart or in a notebook on the document camera.  Why is this so important?

The newest Science Notebooking folio that was just released days ago from FOSS talks about  using a class notebook to showcase:
how to organize your notebookhow to set up a page - with focus question, data section, making sense of your data and reflection/conclusionhow to use a new strategy - like a T chart, a graph, a sentence frame or a diagramthey should NOT be used to copy directly what the teacher thinks - that is the same as the old fashioned teacher directed notes on a chalkboardA teaching tip they include on the side state:

Use of the class notebook should be thoughtfully timed. Doing a class-notebook entry at the end of an activity is helpful to teach the components of a notebook, yet allows you to see what students do…