My Future Business Career...

JUST KIDDING! I'm definitely going to be a teacher. But, I had a really great business idea this morning.

I don't know how many of y'all are familiar with 'the Skimm'. It's an electronic, daily, 'skimmed down' version of current events. Basically, if you subscribe, you get an email every morning with global and national news that is current. It's fabulous.

Anyway, I was reading it this morning, and there was a fabulous little blurb about Common Core and standardized testing in public schools. As student teachers at MNPS, and many of us in older/test-taking grades, this is super relevant! The Skimm even included the link to a more in-depth article on TIME (which I actually posted as a comment on someone else's blog entry!). I got so excited that this was being talked about in a venue other than our little seminar meetings and at school, that I forwarded the article to my entire sorority. And then I started thinking....do my students know about any of this? Do they know that some states have an 'opt-out' option for standardized testing? Do they know that people are talking about this? Do they know that these kind of decisions affect politics?

I spent all morning thinking about how I could talk about these things with my students - relevant news that could be put into kid-friendly terms that they understand. AND THEN, I thought: "HOW GREAT WOULD THIS BE DURING MORNING MEETING?!"

Which is when I came up with the greatest business idea/teacher idea of all time (probably). Somebody needs to email the ladies that run/write the Skimm and tell them that they need to create a kid-friendly version. This could be something that teachers could use during morning meeting or to integrate reading/writing/social studies, OR older students could even get it sent directly to their emails. Parents could even use it to form a common ground for current event conversations at the dinner table!

I think that I might take this idea and run with - a 'Skimm' for my classroom! Maybe as a future teacher, I will rewrite the Skimm that I get every morning (it definitely comes early enough, at around 5:30 am every day) using kid-friendly language. There are endless possibilities, and I feel like their are tons of benefits.