Teaching Is... Stealing?

Good teaching often involves "borrowing" ideas (one might call it "stealing" but I think "borrowing" sounds nicer). I love walking into other classrooms and just looking at the walls to get new ideas for lessons, crafts and projects. I recently walked into one of the other first grade classrooms and saw that the teacher had had her students write dialogue on blank pieces of paper using elbow macaroni for the actual quotation marks. The macaroni was ingenious! I combined the idea with another "borrowed" project that I think I picked up in grad school, which was using sentence strips to record sentences said aloud by students. We did this last week after returning from our field trip to see a live production of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, and I just love how they turned out!