June Internet Activities: http://www.activitiesforkids.com/summer/Junenotes.htm
Summer Calendar for June: http://www.activitiesforkids.com/summer/June.htm

June is Adopt-A-Shelter-Cat Month, American Rivers Month, Cancer In The Sun Month, Dairy Month, Turkey Lover's Month, National Accordian Awareness Month, National Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Month, National Ice Tea Month, National Papaya Month, National Pest Control Month, National Rose Month, Fight The Filthy Fly Month, and Zoo and Aquarium Month.

END OF SCHOOL YEAR . . .
Give each student a piece of white art paper and have them fold in the two sides to the middle (to make a window of sorts). Have each student decorate the outside of the window with words, symbols, pictures (could be a collage) of the journey of this year. Their names should be on the outside of the window. The teacher does a window too. Then have students share with each other the meaning of their windows (as much as they are comfortable sharing). Lead off the sharing as a model. Then have each person sign everyone else's window on the inside with something they have appreciated about that person and/or something (a gift or a talent) that person will bring with them to their next community. For example: Sally, thank you for always being there to listen when I needed a friend. Or... Billy, you will bring the gifts of humor and kindness to those lucky enough to get to know you next year.
*Blain County School District (ID) Summer Learning: http://www.bcsd.k12.id.us/district/summer/summer.html
*Educators Network-End of Year Ideas: http://www.theeducatorsnetwork.com/main/unitfeature.htm
*ELEMENTARY STUDENTS AND SUMMER VACATION:
http://eric-web.tc.columbia.edu/guides/pg21.html
How to make the most of summer vacations for elementary students is the topic of this article. Send a copy home in summer take-home packets for students to give to their parents.
*End of School Lesson Plans: http://www.lessonplanspage.com/EndSchool.htm
*END OF YEAR ACTIVITIES: http://www.theteacherscorner.net/seasonal/endofyear/index.htm
Several teacher suggestions are here for fun and creative ways to wind down your school year.
*END OF YEAR COMMENT IDEAS FOR REPORT CARDS:
http://www.teachnet.com/how-to/endofyear/personalcomments061400.html
No less than 299 report card comments listed here will help you breeze through your own end-of-year reporting.
* END OF YEAR GRADUATION IDEAS: http://www.hummingbirded.com/back_BB_end_year.html#grad
How about rainbow sticks, or even better--edible graduation caps? Find lots of creative suggestions here for celebrating your class graduation.
*It's Quittin' Time: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev072.shtml
* A PICNIC OF IDEAS:
http://www.ILoveThatTeachingIdea.com/WRCenter/langarts/
Picnic%20End%20of%20the%20Year%20Theme.pdf
This three page printable lets students create their own picnic basket to take home, full of writing exercises of memories created throughout the year. Allow students time to pass around their completed projects for classmate autographs on the basket itself.
*PRINTABLE AWARDS AND CERTIFICATES:
http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-6076.html
If you're challenged to come up with special awards for each and every one of your students, this might be the place to help you out. It offers printable certificates for appreciation, acts of kindness, behavior, improvements, and gratitude--and goes well beyond the typical achievement award varieties
*SCHOOL MEMORY BOOK: http://www.EnchantedLearning.com/crafts/books/schoolmemory/
With a page for autographs, a self-portrait, planning for summer vacation, and favorite events during the school year, this book will become a treasured favorite. Download and print enough copies for each of your students to collate and personalize.
*SUMMER ENRICHMENT: http://www.creativeclassroom.org/mj02aplus/
From Sensational Packets to Great Goodbyes, here are a few suggestions to make good use of your students' summer holidays.

Father's Day
The idea for a day to thank and celebrate fathers came from a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd in 1909, after she listened to a Mother's Day sermon. She had been raised by her father, Henry Jackson Smart and wondered why there wasn't an official day when she could let him know how grateful she was to him. She held the first Father's Day celebration in Spokane, Washington on June 19, 1910. In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge made it an official holiday, proclaiming the third Sunday in June as Father's Day.
*Billy Bear's Happy Father's Day: http://www.billybear4kids.com/holidays/father/dad.htm
*BlackDog's Father's Day Celebration: http://blackdog4kids.com/holiday/dad/index.html
*Crafts for Father's Day: http://www.garvick.com/annual/fathers_day/crafts/
*Dad's Day!: http://www.bonus.com/bonus/list/father_day.html?referrer=KG6
*Father's Day:
http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/dad/
http://www.perpetualpreschool.com/fathers_day.html
*Father's Day Activies:
http://www.kinderart.com/seasons/june.shtml#father
http://www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/dad/index.html
*Father's Day Art Ideas For Kids: http://www.amazingmoms.com/htm/fathersdayartideas.htm
*Father's Day Cards:
http://www.bry-backmanor.org/actpag46.html
http://www.bry-backmanor.org/actpag47.html
http://www.bry-backmanor.org/actpag48.html
*Father's Day Crafts: Students wrap three or four Hershey's Hugs in a circle of fabric which they then tie with ribbon. The kids write messages on little cards, attach them with the ribbon and present them to their parents saying, "Here's a hug for you."
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/fathersday/
http://www.angiesrealm.com/fathers-day/crafts/index.html
*Father's Day ECards: http://www.cyber-cards.com/gbrowse.php?cat_id=29
*Father's Day Graphics: http://rats2u.com/clipart/holidays/father_clipart.htm
*Fathers Day Greeting Cards-ECards from 123 Greetings.com: http://www.123greetings.com/events/fathers_day/
*Father's Day Lesson Plans: http://www.lessonplanspage.com/FathersDay.htm
*Father's Day on the Net: http://www.holidays.net/father/index.htm
*Father's Day Songs: http://www.geocities.com/ohtoad/FathersDay.html
*Games For Father's Day: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/9087/father/fgames.html
*No More Ties: http://family.go.com/crafts/season/feature/famf67fathersday/?clk=1012970
Elementary students can make a very cute puppy dog pencil holder, photo house or wallet collage.
*Preschool Education Music and Songs - Father's Day: http://www.preschooleducation.com/sfather.shtml
*Roxanne's Father's Day: http://www.rexanne.com/fday-main.html
*Sesame Workshop - Dads: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/parents/advice/results.php?categoryId=91
*Sesame Workshop - Parents' Activity Planner: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/parents/activity/results.php?categoryId=4461
*Songs For Father's Day: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/9087/father/fsongs.html
*The ChildFun Family Website - Father's Day: http://www.childfun.com/themes/dad.shtml
Find several creative ideas here for preschoolers to make Father's Day gifts. Items include pop-up cards, construction ties, bookmarks, puzzle pictures, and a special treasure box for Dad.
A Special Letter to Dad: http://www.searsportrait.com/storybook/dad_99_form.html
Father's Day Coupons: http://members.nbci.com/EmilyNoel/dadcoupon.html
Father's Day Ideas For Kids: http://www.amazingmoms.com/htm/fathersdayartideas.htm
Just Me And My Dad: http://freeway.net/~mgriffus/crit0.htm 
My First Letter For Father's Day: http://www.searsportrait.com/storybook/dad_wlw_99_form.html 
Ode To Father's Day: http://www.ctw.org/parents/advice/article/0,4125,1130,00.html
Daddy Wears A Funny Hat: http://www.lil-fingers.com/daddy/ 
Father's Day Graphics: http://rats2u.com/clipart/holidays/father_clipart.htm 
Father's Day Kid Sites: http://members.aol.com/Love4JULI/dad-kids.html 
Father's Day Page: http://www.nuttinbutkids.com/fathersday.html 
Father's Hall Of Fame: http://www.fathershalloffame.com/ 
How To Tie A Tie: http://www.thetie.com/knots.htm

June 1
-1637: Jacques Marquette, Jesuit priest and French explorer of the Mississippi, was born. 
-1801: Mormon leader Brigham Young, born in Whitingham, Vermont. He was a master carpenter living in upstate New York when a relative gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon. Two years later, he joined the new church and traveled to Kirtland, Ohio, to meet Joseph Smith. He immediately became one of the church's most passionate supporters and Smith selected him as one of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. When Smith died, Young was elected the new leader of the church, and in February of 1845, he led his people to Iowa. But he decided that in order to escape persecution, the Mormons needed to settle in a place where there were no other settlers. He had studied maps and military surveys of the West, and he decided that the best place to go would be the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, which is where he took his people in 1847. 
PBS-THE WEST-Brigham Young: http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/young.htm
-1812: President James Madison warned Congress that war with Britain was imminent.  The War of 1812 started 17 days later. 
-1878: John Masefield was born in Ledbury, England. When he was only thirteen years old, he went off to work on the merchant-navy ship, the HMS Conway. Though he initially hated being a sailor, Masefield learned to love the way his fellow sailors were constantly spinning tales of their adventures at sea. When he was seventeen years old, after sailing around the Southern tip of South America, he sailed to New York City and deserted his ship to try to make a new life for himself. He traveled through the countryside, taking any farm work that was offered, and he slept under the stars, without much to eat. He got a job at a carpet factory, and spent almost all his money on books. After two years in the United States, Masefield sailed back to England and began publishing poems about the sea, collected in his first book of poems Salt-Water Ballads (1902). He wrote many more books of poetry, and became England's poet laureate in 1930.
John Masefield: http://www.publishingcentral.com/masefield/
-1880: The first public pay telephone began operation in New Haven, Conn.
-1921: Bandleader Nelson Riddle was born.  
-1926: Actress Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson in Los Angeles, California. Her mother was a negative cutter in a film studio lab and had a lot of boyfriends. Monroe never knew the identity of her father. Her mother, who drank, smoked, danced, and worked for the movie industry, sometimes took her on daytrips to Hollywood, pointing out any movie star they saw on the streets. Monroe later got a job at an aircraft factory called Radioplane, where she sprayed glue on fabrics and inspected and folded parachutes. She was working at the factory when a group of photographers showed up to take pictures of women working for the war effort. One of the photographers convinced her to become a model. She bleached her hair and began to appear on the covers of magazines. She had trouble breaking into movies. For a while, directors just cast her in any movie that called for a dumb blond. She also played a psychotic baby sitter in the movie Don't Bother to Knock (1952). Her first huge success was the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
Marilyn Monroe's Official Web site: http://www.marilynmonroe.com/
-1926: Actor Andy Griffith was born.
-1930: Pat Corley ("Murphy Brown") and Edward Woodward ("The Equalizer") were born.   
-1934: Crooner Pat Boone was born. 
-1937: Actor Morgan Freeman was born. 
-1939: Actor/comedian Cleavon Little was born. 
1940: Actor Rene Auberjonois ("Bensen," "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine") was born.
-1947: Actor Jonathan Pryce and rock musician Ron Wood of The Rolling Stones were born.
-1956: Actress Lisa Hartman Black was born. 
-1964: Comedian/actor Mark Curry ("Hangin' With Mr. Cooper") was born. The U.S. Supreme Court banned prayers and Bible teaching in public schools on the constitutional grounds of separation of church and state. 
-1968: Author-lecturer Helen Keller, who earned a college degree despite being blind and deaf most of her life, died in Westport, Conn.
-1973: Greek Prime Minister George Papadopoulos abolished the Greek monarchy and proclaimed Greece a republic with himself as president. 
-1974: Singer Alanis Morissette was born.
-1980: The Cable News Network (CNN), TV's first all-news service, went on the air. 
-1990: President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to sharp cuts in chemical and nuclear weapons, and signed a trade pact despite U.S. concern over the Lithuanian crisis. The South African government proposed a bill to scrap the 37-year-old law segregating buses, trains, toilets, libraries, swimming pools and other public amenities. 
1991: Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh resolved their differences over a conventional weapons reduction treaty. 
-1993: The Guatemalan military, acting in response to appeals from the judiciary and the public, ousted President Jorge Serrano Elias from office.  President Dobrica Cosic of Yugoslavia was voted out of office by the Parliament. 
-1997: French parliamentary elections brought parties of the left into power for the first time since 1986. 
-2000: A federal appeals court upheld the right of U.S. immigration officials to let Elian Gonzalez's father take the 6-year-old boy back to Cuba.

June 2
-1840: British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Brocklehampton, in Dorset, one of the poorest counties in the country, where rural life hadn't changed much in hundreds of years and older people spoke a local dialect similar to German. His fictional county of Wessex, where he set much of his work, was based on that landscape. He became one of the most famous English writers of his time and his work, particularly Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), are still read today. There have always been people who complain that Hardy's novels are too gloomy and that they end unhappily. But Hardy's books remain popular, and not just with critics: every year ten thousand people visit the cottage where he was born. Since the 1920s his Complete Poems have never gone out of print, and people who love him point to his compassion. Jude the Obscure was considered scandalous. It's about Jude Fawley, a poor stone carver who wants to go to university but can't, and who begins a relationship with a cousin when his wife leaves him. It outraged Hardy's wife. She was afraid people would consider it autobiographical. Hardy decided to give up novels, and turned exclusively to poetry.
The Thomas Hardy Association: http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/Welcome/welcomet.htm
-1865: The Civil War came to a formal end. Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, surrendered, and the last Confederate army ceased to exist. The war that cost 620,000 American lives was over.
-1913: Barbara Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, England. She was the author of comic novels about English upper-middle-class life, including Excellent Women (1952). In the 1960's she fell out of favor and her career languished for sixteen years until, in 1977, her name appeared twice in a Times Literary Supplement poll of the most underrated writers of the century. She made her comeback that year with her novel Quartet in Autumn.
An Excellent Woman: http://www.spore.it/pym/home_english.htm
-1930: Astronaut Pete Conrad was born.
-1933: Movie director Barry Levinson (Rain Man [Academy Award 1988] Disclosure, Jimmy Hollywood, Good Morning VietNam, The Natural, Toys, Diner, Bugsy, Avalon) was born.
-1941: Actor Stacy Keach and musician Charlie Watts (drummer, Rolling Stones) were born.
-1944: Musician and composer Marvin Hamlisch was born.
-1948: Actor Jerry Mathers was born.
-1953: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in London's Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth Windsor was officially crowned Queen. Millions of spectators watched the procession as the 27 year old Elizabeth and her husband, 30 year old Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh, former Prince of Denmark and of Greece. During the Second World War, she was a Second Lieutenant in the Women's Services and trained as a truck driver and repairer.
-1955: Actor and comedian Dana Carvey was born.

June 3
-1808: Jefferson Davis, American soldier and president of the Confederacy, was born.
-1835: P.T. Barnum made his first tour of the United States on this day. He had purchased a black slave named Joice Heth and paraded her across the country claiming she was 161 years old and was once a nurse to President George Washington. He purchased a museum in New York City in 1841, where he put on display various unusual individuals such as a midget and a set of Siamese twins. In 1871 he began taking “The greatest show on earth” on the road. Ten years later he merged his circus with that of James Anthony Bailey, forming Barnum and Bailey’s Circus.
-1906: Josephine Baker was born Frieda Josephine Carson in St. Louis, Missouri, a dancer and singer who became one of the most popular music-hall entertainers in France. She became a French citizen in 1937. During the German occupation of France, Baker worked with the Red Cross and the French Résistance, and she entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East. She was awarded the Legion of Honour. After the war she married a Frenchman and devoted herself to adopting babies of all nationalities in what she called "an experiment in brotherhood" and her "rainbow tribe."
Josephine Baker: http://www1.things.org:8080/music/al_stewart/history/josephine_baker.html
-1926: Allen Ginsberg, poet, was born in Newark, New Jersey.  He is best known as a leading member of the "Beat Movement," an American social and literary movement originated in the 1950s where artists, derisively called "beatniks," expressed their alienation from conventional society by adopting a style of seedy dress, detached manners, and a "hip" vocabulary. They advocated sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism. Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956), along with Kerouac's On the Road ultimately became the "Beat" movement's twin scriptures.
Allen Ginsberg: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=8
-1936: Larry McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas. His early novels were set in the Southwest, on the frontier and in small towns. They included Horseman, Pass By (1961) and The Last Picture Show (1966), which were both made into movies. Then 1981 he wrote an essay in The Texas Observer in which he said that "the cowboy myth" had become "an inhibiting, rather than a creative, factor in our literary life," and that "there was really no more that needed to be said about it." But a few years later he published one of his best books, Lonesome Dove (1985), a historical novel about a cattle drive, and it won a Pulitzer Prize.
Larry McMurtry: http://mostlyfiction.com/west/mcmurtry.htm
-1942: Battle of the Midway that turned the tide of WWII was fought.
-1965: Astronaut Edward White became the first American to "walk" in space, during the flight of Gemini 4.

June 4
-1928: Sex expert "Dr. Ruth," Ruth Westheimer, born Karola Ruth Siegel in Frankfurt, Germany to Orthodox Jewish parents. The Nazis came to power, and in 1939 her family decided to flee Germany. But her grandmother refused to go, so Ruth was sent to safety at a Swiss school. She never saw her family again. After the war she moved to Palestine, joined the underground movement fighting for a Jewish state, and trained as a sniper. Eventually she moved to New York, got her degree, and started broadcasting a radio show called Sexually Speaking that made her famous.
- 1989: Chinese army troops stormed Tiananmen Square in Beijing to crush the pro-democracy movement; hundreds - possibly thousands - of people died.

June 5
World Environment Day, established in 1972 by the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
-1850: Pat Garrett, lawman, born in Chambers Co, AL. From the age of 17 he led the life of a cowboy and buffalo hunter, eventually settling in Lincoln Co, NM. He became sheriff of the town, and is remembered for tracking down and killing the escaped murderer, Billy the Kid.
-1898: Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain. He is known primarily for his Andalusian works, including the poetry collections Gypsy Ballads (1928) and Lament for a Bullfighter (1935). He wrote the comedy The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife (1930) and the tragedy Blood Wedding (1933). Lorca grew up in a small village in Andalusia, in southern Spain, a place untouched by the modern world. He fell in love with poetry, with Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. He moved to Madrid, where he met other poets his age and the artist Salvador Dali, who became his close friend and lover. His Gypsy Ballads made him suddenly famous in 1929. But he suffered from depression and sought escape by traveling to New York City and Cuba. He was astounded by New York. He loved it at first -- he was awed by the skyscrapers and thought the people were incredibly friendly. He went to parties where he would entertain people by playing piano and teaching them Spanish songs. He never learned English, and gradually, he became disillusioned with the city. He was not a political person, but when the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936 he was arrested by General Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces for his homosexuality and liberal views. On August 18, he was taken to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, six miles from Granada. Shortly before dawn, next to a stand of olive trees on the hillside, he was shot. He was just 38.
Federico Garcia Lorca: http://boppin.com/lorca/
-1939: English novelist Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Her older sister, A. S. Byatt, is also a novelist. Drabble's early novels, including A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1965), and The Millstone (1965), are full of what Drabble calls "high-powered girls" -- female protagonists who are young, attractive, and smart. Her recent novels include The Peppered Moth (2001), about four generations of a Yorkshire mining family, and The Seven Sisters (2002).
-1949: Welsh novelist Ken Follett was born in Cardiff, Wales. He was a crime reporter for the Evening News in London when he wrote his first mystery novel, The Big Needle (1974), very quickly to pay for his car repairs. It was not a success. He kept writing, rapidly. In the next four years he published twelve books, including Eye of the Needle (1978), which sold five million copies and became a best seller in twenty languages. He was twenty-nine, "the world's youngest millionaire author."
-1968: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded just after claiming victory in California's Democratic presidential primary. Gunman Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was immediately arrested.

June 6
June 6th has been deemed National Yo-Yo Day in honor of Donald Duncan Sr.'s birthday and the phenomenal influence he had in the world. The yo-yo is the second oldest known toy in the world (only the doll is older), and was born over 3,000 years ago in the days of ancient Greece. Before anybody called it "yo-yo" (meaning "come back" or "return" in the native language of the Philippines, Tagalog), it was popular in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe under many names including "quiz," "bandalore," "l'emigrette," "coblentz," and "incroyable." It was called "disk" by the ancient Greeks.
Spintastics Skill Toys: http://www.spintastics.com/index.asp
Duncan Yo-Yo: http://www.yo-yo.com
Cosmic's Yo-Yo Tricks: http://199.44.235.52/cosmic/trickindex.html
Get Ready to Yo-Yo!: http://www.yoyoguy.com/info/yoyo/index.html
-1844: YMCA Founding Day
-1935: Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet was born in Taktser, China. He was designated the 14th Dalai Lama in 1937.  He fled to Chumbi in South Tibet after an abortive anti-Chinese uprising in 1950, but negotiated an autonomy agreement with the People's Republic the following year. For the next eight years, he served as the nominal ruler of Tibet. After China's suppression of the Tibetan national uprising of 1959, he was forced into permanent exile, settling at Dharamsala in Punjab, India, where he established a democratically-based alternative government. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of his commitment to the nonviolent liberation of his homeland.
- 1944: The D-Day invasion of Europe took place during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.
-1958: Composer, musician and singer Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

June 7
-1778: British fashion-plate George "Beau" Brummel was born. 
-1848: French post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin was born. 
-1864: Republican delegates meeting in Baltimore re-nominated Abraham Lincoln as president. His running mate was Andrew Johnson. 
-1899: Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth (Dorothea Cole) Bowen was born in Dublin. Her family were Protestant landowners, and she grew up on a country estate called Bowen's Court at a time when the Protestant Irish felt increasingly uneasy and isolated by "The Troubles" between the Irish revolutionaries and the British soldiers. The Anglo-Irish like Bowen were caught between their loyalty to Britain and their own sense of Irishness. Her novel The Last September (1929), takes place during this time before Irish independence. During World War II, Bowen lived in London and served as an air raid warden. She enjoyed it. She said, "Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town." She set her novel The Heat of the Day (1949) in wartime London, and it became her best-known work.
Elizabeth Bowen: http://www.irishwriters-online.com/elizabethbowen.html
-1909: Jessica Tandy, stage and film actress was born in London, England. Starting her career in England, she first came to act in the U.S. in 1930.  It was not until her role as Blanche in the original "Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) did she begin to be perceived as an American actress.   She won an Oscar (1989) as leading actress in "Driving Miss Daisy."
-1917: Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was born in Topeka, Kansas. She lived in Chicago for most of her life, from when she was just a month old, and grew up on the South Side. She said, "I wrote about what I saw and heard on the street. I lived on a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then on the other. That was my material." Her first book was A Street in Bronzeville (1945), and she followed it up with Annie Allen (1949), the book that won the Pulitzer, and The Bean Eaters (1960). 
Voices From the Gaps: Gwendolyn Brooks: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/BROOKSgwendolyn.html
-1929: The sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.
-1940: Singer Tom Jones was born. 
-1942: Japanese forces occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. U.S. forces retook the islands one year later. 
-1946: Talk-show host Jenny Jones was born. 
-1952: Actor Liam Neeson ("Schindler's List") was born. 
-1954: Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota. She has published three books of poetry, but she's best known for her fiction: her novels Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), and The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), about a German soldier who returns home from World War I, marries his best friend's pregnant widow, packs up his father's butcher knives, and moves with his wife to North Dakota, where they set up a meat shop. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her German father and Chippewa mother taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, and her grandfather had been tribal chair of the Chippewa Turtle Mountain Reservation. Her father used to give her a nickel for every story she wrote.
The SALON Interview: Louise Erdrich: http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960506.html
-1958: Singer/songwriter Prince (formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince) was born.
-1975: The first videocassette recorder went on sale to the public. 
-1981: Tennis star Anna Kournikova was born. 
-1982: Israeli jets bombed central Beirut while Israeli ground forces captured Beaufort Castle and surrounded the Lebanese city of Sidon. 
-1983: One day after Nicaragua expelled three U.S. diplomats, the Reagan administration ordered six Nicaraguan consulates closed and expelled six Nicaraguan diplomats. 
-1990: South African President de Klerk lifted a four-year-old nationwide state of emergency in all but the strife-torn Indian Ocean province of Natal. 
-1991: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir rejected U.S. calls for compromise to convene a Middle East peace conference. 
-1993, the ninth International Conference on AIDS opened in Berlin. 
-1996: Max Factor, who pioneered smudge-proof lipstick, died. 
-1997: the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup with a 2-1 victory over the Philadelphia Flyers. It was the team's first hockey title in 42 years. 
-2000: The federal judge hearing the Microsoft anti-trust suit ordered the break-up of the software giant.

June 8
-632: The prophet Mohammed died on this day. He rode a white horse named Al-Borak to Heaven. Al-Borak, which means "the lightning," was brought to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel. It had the face and voice of a man but the cheeks of a horse. It had the wings of an eagle, the tail of a peacock, and each stride went as far as a person could see.
Mohammed the Prophet: http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/prophet/lifeofprophet.html
-1789: James Madison first proposed the Bill of Rights, which led to the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
-1810: Composer Robert Schumann was born.
-1861: Tennessee seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy.
-1869: Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin.
Frank Lloyd Wright: http://www.pbs.org/flw/ Also in 1869, Ives McGaffney of Chicago obtained a patent for a "sweeping machine," the first vacuum cleaner.
-1910: John W. Campbell, called "the father of science fiction," born in Newark, New Jersey (1910). His first published story, "When the Atoms Failed" (1930), contained one of the earliest depictions of computers.
-1916: British geneticist and biophysicist Francis Crick, who helped determine the "double helix" structure of DNA, was born in Northampton, England. On February 28, 1953, Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and, according to James Watson, announced that "we had found the secret of life." That morning, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the chemical substance that carries our genes.
Francis Crick: http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1962/crick-bio.html
-1918: Actor Robert Preston was born.  
-1925: Barbara Bush, former first lady, mother of President George W. Bush was born. Shortly after the presidential election, Barbara was diagnosed with a potentially debilitating thyroid condition called Graves’ disease. While undergoing radiation treatments, she remained active in her role as first lady. Regarded as one of the most popular presidential wives, Barbara published a candid account of her public and private life in the autobiography "Barbara Bush: A Memoir" (1994).
-1929: Actor Jerry Stiller ("Seinfeld") was born. 
-1933: Comedian Joan Rivers was born. 
-1936: Actor/singer James Darren and baseball great Lou Brock, were born. 
-1940: Singer Nancy Sinatra was born. 
-1944: Singer/songwriter Boz Scaggs was born. 
-1950: Actress Kathy Baker ("Picket Fences") was born. 
-1955: Actor Griffin Dunne was born.
-1957: "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams was born in Catskill, New York.
Dilbert.com-News and History-About Scott Adams: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/news_and_history/html/about_scott_adams.html
-1958: Comedian Keenan Ivory Wayans was born. 
-1966: Actress Juliana Margulies ("E.R.") was born.
-1967: The USS Liberty, a intelligence ship sailing in international waters off Egypt, was attacked by Israeli jet planes and torpedo boats. 34 Americans were killed in the attack, which Israel claimed was a case of mistaken identity. 
-1968: Authorities announced the capture in London of James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
-1985: The United Nations said worsening famine in 19 African nations would claim tens of millions of lives despite massive international aid. 
-1987: Fawn Hall, former secretary to Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North, told congressional hearings that to protect her boss, she helped him alter and shred sensitive documents and smuggle papers out of the White House. 
-1990: Israel's nearly three-month-old government crisis ended when Yitzhak Shamir and his Likud party won support of six right-wing and religious parties to form one of the most right-wing governing coalitions in Israeli history. An explosion started a fire aboard the Norwegian tanker Mega Borg, 57 miles off Galveston, Texas. The blaze burned for days as part of tanker's load of 38 million gallons leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. 
-1991: A $12 million parade for the Persian Gulf War veterans, including 8,000 troops and military jets flying overhead, was held in Washington, D.C. 
-1992: PLO's chief of European security was shot dead in a Paris street less than 2 years after his former chief was gunned down in Tunisia. The U.N. Security Council authorized deployment of an infantry battalion to take over the airport in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and open it to humanitarian aid flights. 
-1993: Republican businessman Richard Riordan defeated Democrat Michael Woo to become the first GOP mayor of Los Angeles since 1961. 
-1994: President Clinton received an honorary degree from Britain's Oxford University, which he had attended as a Rhodes scholar.  Two of the major warring factions in Bosnia, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Bosnian Serbs, signed a cease-fire agreement. The truce went into effect June 10. 
-1995: U.S. Marines rescued downed American pilot Scott O'Grady in Bosnia. California Gov. Pete Wilson entered the presidential race as a Republican candidate. 
-1998: European Union foreign ministers urged NATO and the United Nations to consider military action against the Yugoslav Serbs in their crackdown on the rebellious province of Kosovo. 
-1999: The case of 5 New York City police officers accused in the 1997 torturing of a Haitian immigrant ended with the conviction of one of the officers. A second officer had pleaded guilty; 3 others were acquitted.

June 9
-1781: George Stephenson, railway engineer, was born in Wylam, England;  At Killingworth in 1814 he constructed his first locomotive (1814). His most famous engine, the Rocket, was built in 1829. He worked as an engineer for several railway companies, and became a widely used consultant.
-1791: American playwright John Howard Payne was born in New York City. He's remembered today for writing the song "Home Sweet Home," which was first performed in 1823 as part of the opera Clari, the Maid of Milan. The song begins, "Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, / Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." Payne thought it was ironic that he had written this song; he spent the last years of his life in Tunisia, Africa, 4,360 miles away from his childhood home in New York City.
-1893: Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana. He went to Yale University, where he got horrible grades but wrote and performed over three hundred songs for school shows. He went off to Europe and eventually settled in Paris, where he lived for most of the 1920s. He was known for playing piano and singing tunes at fancy parties in his apartment, which was decorated with zebra skin furniture, platinum-colored wallpaper and ceiling-high mirrors. In 1928, he wrote his first big hit, "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love," which begins, "Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it." After that his career took off, and he ended up writing hundreds of songs for movies, television, and Broadway shows. He had some of his biggest hits in the '40s and '50s, including Kiss Me, Kate (1948). In his spare time in between writing hit shows, Cole Porter learned five languages and took astronomy classes, so almost all of his songs had something in them about the moon or the stars.
Cole Wide Web: http://www.coleporter.org/
-1934: Birthday of cartoon character Donald Duck, created by Walt Disney.
-1956: American mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida. She is the author of Postmortem (1991), The Body Farm (1994), and Hornet's Nest (1997), among many other books. She worked as a medical examiner, a volunteer police officer, and a crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer before she wrote her first novel in 1991.

June 10
-1652: Establishment of the first US mint.
-1692: First execution from the Salem Withch Trials, Salem, Massachusetts.
-1819: French painter Gustave Courbet was born in Ornans, France. He painted gritty pictures of small-town funerals and hardworking peasants at a time when everyone else was busy painting naked Venuses and prancing wood nymphs.
-1910: Rhythm & blues singer Howlin' Wolf is born Chester Arthur Burnett in West Point, MS, USA. His most popular and influential songs include "Smokestack Lightning" and "Killing Floor".
-1911: Terence Rattigan was born in London. He's the author of the plays French Without Tears (1936), Flare Path (1942), and The Winslow Boy (1946), among many others.
-1915: Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec to Russian immigrants. He's the author of The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Seize the Day (1956), Humboldt's Gift (1975), and Ravelstein. He grew up in Chicago, where he would later set the action of many of his novels. He was a marine in World War II and afterwards spent two years traveling through Europe and writing his first novel, The Adventures of Augie March. He wrote it in cafes and on trains and subways. The novel was an immediate success and established Bellow as one of the great writers of his generation.
Saul Bellow: http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-bio.html
-1925: American writer Nat Hentoff was born in Boston. He's written novels, biographies, books about jazz, children's books, and countless political columns about the Bill of Rights. American fiction writer James Salter was born James Horowitz in New York City. He went to West Point and became a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and used the experience as a basis for his first two novels, The Hunters (1956) and The Arm of Flesh (1961).
-1928: Children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak was born in Brooklyn, New York. He wrote the children's classic Where the Wild Things Are (1964), about a young boy named Max who imagines a community of scary monsters in a faraway land.
-1935: Establishment of Alcoholics Anonymous
-1967: The Six-Day War ended as Israel and Syria agreed to observe a United Nations-mediated cease-fire.

June 11
-1910: Jacques-Yves Cousteau, French marine scientist, was born.
-1920: Hazel Scott, singer, was born.

June 12
-1806: John Augustus Roebling, designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, was born. 
-1924: George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st US President, was born. 
-1929: Anne Frank, whose diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, told of hiding from the Nazis in occupied Holland, was born. 
-1932: Author Rona Jaffe was born. 
-1933: Comic actor Jim Nabors was born. 
-1938: Singer Vic Damone was born. 
-1939: The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated at Cooperstown, N.Y. 
-1941: Jazz musician Chick Corea was born. 
-1943: Sportscaster Marvin Philip "Marv" Albert was born. 
-1957: Actor Timothy Busfield was born. 
-1963: A sniper killed civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss. 
-1967: Actress Sherry Stringfield ("NYPD Blue," "E.R.") was born.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not outlaw inter-racial marriages. 
-1971: Tricia Nixon, daughter of President Nixon, married Edward Finch Cox in the first wedding ever held in the Rose Garden of the White House. 
-1979: Bryan Allen, 26, pedaled the 70-pound Gossamer Albatross 22 miles across the English Channel for the first human-powered flight across that body of water. 
-1982: An estimated 700,000 people gathered in New York's Central Park to call for world nuclear disarmament. 
-1986: The South African government, faced with rising black unrest, declared a nationwide state of emergency. 
-1989: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that white workers who claim to be treated unfairly as a result of affirmative action programs can sue for remedies under civil rights legislation. 
-1990: The Russian republic's legislature, under Boris Yeltsin, passed a radical declaration of sovereignty, proclaiming Russia's laws take precedence over those of the central Soviet government in the republic's territory. 
-1991: The Russian republic held its first-ever direct presidential elections. Boris Yeltsin won. The event is celebrated these days in Russia as a national holiday known as Independence Day. 
-1992: Amid extremely tight security and criticism of his administration's stand on environmental issues, President Bush addressed the Earth Summit. He urged rich nations to meet by year's end to outline specific action on a climate treaty. 
-1993: U.S. helicopters and gunships destroyed four of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid's arms depots, one week after his forces allegedly killed 23 Pakistani members of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in a series of firefights. 
-1994: Special Whitewater counsel Robert Fiske took sworn depositions from President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was believed to be the first time a sitting president responded directly to questions in a legal case relating to his official conduct. 
-1999: Texas Gov. George W. Bush announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. 
-2000: 50 years after the Korean War began, the leaders of North and South Korea met on Pyongyang for the first-ever series of talks.

June 13
-323 B.C.: Alexander the Great died of fever in Babylon at age 33. 
-1786: U.S. Army Gen. Winfield Scott was born. 
-1865: Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats was born. 
-1892: Actor Basil Rathbone was born. 
-1899: Mexican composer Carlos Chavez was born. 
-1903: Football player Harold "Red" Grange was born. 
-1913: TV host Ralph Edwards was born. 
-1935: Bulgarian-born artist Christo was born. 
-1943: Actors Malcolm McDowell was born. 
-1944: The first German V-1 "buzz bomb" hit London.
-1951: Richard Thomas was born. 
-1953: Comedian Tim Allen was born. 
-1962: Actresses Ally Sheedy was born.
-1966: In Miranda vs. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police must read an arrestee their constitutional rights before questioning them. 
-1977: James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., was captured in a Tennessee wilderness area after escaping from prison. 
-1983: The robot spacecraft Pioneer-10 became the first man-made object to leave the solar system. It did so 11 years after it was launched. 
-1986: Twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen were born.
-1987: President Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, publicly challenged Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."
-1991: Revising a policy with roots to the McCarthy era, the Bush administration agreed to remove almost all 250,000 names on a secret list of unacceptable aliens.  
-1992: The U.N. Earth Summit ended in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 
-1993: 20 Somalis were killed and 50 more wounded when Pakistani members of the U.N. peacekeeping forces fired into a crowd of demonstrators protesting U.N. attacks on warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid.  Canada got its first woman prime minister when the Progressive Conservative Party elected Kim Campbell to head the party, and thus the country. 
-1994: The ex-wife of O.J. Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman, were found stabbed to death outside her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. 
-1996: Members of the Freemen militia surrendered, 10 days after the FBI cut off electricity to their Montana compound. The standoff lasted 81 days. 
-1997, jurors unanimously recommended convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh be sentenced to death.  The Chicago Bulls won their fifth National Basketball Association title in seven years when they downed the Utah Jazz, four games to two.

June 14
Flag Day
On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the flag of the United States. In 1877, citizens held celebrations throughout the country in honor of the flag's hundredth birthday. From that time on, groups urged the government to declare June 14 "Flag Day." Their requests finally met with success in 1949, when President Harry Truman signed legislation making June 14th a national day of remembrance. No one knows the exact origins of the first American flag, but it was probably designed by Congressman Francis Hopkinson and was sewn by Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross. The 50 stars on today's flag represent the nation's 50 states and the 13 stripes represent the 13 original states. The color red signifies hardiness and valor; white, purity and innocence; and blue, vigilance, perseverance and justice.
*When the flag is displayed over the middle of the street, it should be suspended vertically with the union to the north in an east and west street or to the east in a north and south street.
*The flag of the United States of America, when it is displayed with another flag against a wall from crossed staffs, should be on the right, the flag's own right [that means the viewer's left], and its staff should be in front of the staff of the other flag.
*The flag, when flown at half-staff, should be first hoisted to the peak for an instant and then lowered to the half-staff position. The flag should be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day. By "half-staff" is meant lowering the flag to one-half the distance between
the top and bottom of the staff. Crepe streamers may be affixed to spear heads or flagstaffs in a parade only by order of the President of the United States.
*When flags of states, cities, or localities, or pennants of societies are flown on the same halyard with the flag of the United States, the latter should always be at the peak. When the flags are flown from adjacent staffs, the flag of the United States should be hoisted first and lowered last.
No such flag or pennant may be placed above the flag of the United States or to the right of the flag of the United States.
*When the flag is suspended over a sidewalk from a rope extending from a house to a pole at the edge of the sidewalk, the flag should be hoisted out, union first, from the building.
*When the flag of the United States is displayed from a staff projecting horizontally or at an angle from the window sill, balcony, or front of a building, the union of the flag should be placed at the peak of the staff unless the flag is at half-staff.
*When the flag is used to cover a casket, it should be so placed that the union is at the head and over the left shoulder. The flag should not be lowered into the grave or allowed to touch the ground.
*When the flag is displayed in a manner other than by being flown from a staff, it should be displayed flat, whether indoors or out. When displayed either horizontally or vertically against a wall, the union should be uppermost and to the flag's own right, that is, to the observer's left. When displayed in a window it should be displayed in the same way, that is with the union or blue field to the left of the observer in the street. When festoons, rosettes or drapings are desired, bunting of blue, white and red should be used, but never the flag.
*That the flag, when carried in a procession with another flag, or flags, should be either on the marching right; that is, the flag's own right, or, if there is a line of other flags, in front of the center of that line.
*The flag of the United States of America should be at the center and at the highest point of the group when a number of flags of States or localities or pennants of societies are grouped and displayed from staffs.
*When flags of two or more nations are displayed, they are to be flown from separate staffs of the same height. The flags should be of approximately equal size. International usage forbids the display of the flag of one nation above that of another nation in time of peace.
*When displayed from a staff in a church or public auditorium on or off a podium, the flag of the United States of America should hold the position of superior prominence, in advance of the audience, and in the position of honor at the clergyman's or speaker's right as he faces the audience. Any other flag so displayed should be placed on the left of the clergyman or speaker (to the right of the audience).
*When the flag is displayed on a car, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender.
*When hung in a window where it is viewed from the street, place the union at the head and over the left shoulder.
The United States Flag Page: http://www.usflag.org/
This site is dedicated to information relating to all aspects of the Flag of the United States of America.
STARS AND STRIPES WRITING ACTIVITY:
http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-5922.html
Students will consider the American flag as a symbol of our nation, and find words in prewriting drills to describe the emotions and meanings the flag engenders. Both a rough draft and final copy worksheet are available to download and print here.
TeacherVision: Flag Day Activities:
http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-6620.phtml
ChildFun's Flag Day Themes: http://childfun.com/themes/flag.shtml
The Holiday Zone: Flag Day: http://www.theholidayzone.com/flag/index.html
Betsy Ross Homepage: http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/
SEQUIN FLAG MAGNET: http://www.makingfriends.com/flag_sequin.htm
A fairly simple craft, it nevertheless glitters as a great project for showing patriotism.
FLAG CAKE: http://www.kidsdomain.com/craft/flagcake.html
If you have a kitchen available for school use, let your students practice measurements with this red, white, and blue flag cake--it doesn't hurt that some of the ingredients are strawberries, blueberries, and marshmallows as well.
CRAFT STICK FLAGS: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/july4/craftstickflag/
Simple components for this Flag Day craft include craft sticks, paint, and glue. Stick them in masses in flowerbeds around your school, line the sidewalk, or put them in classroom flowerpots for a patriotic effect.
Flag Day Lesson Plans: http://www.lessonplanspage.com/FlagDay.htm
-1623: The first breach of promise suit was filed in the United States. The Rev. Greville Pooley sued Cicely Jordan in Charles City, Va., for jilting him in favor of another man. 
-1775: The Continental Congress established the army as the first U.S. military service. 
-1777: The Star and Stripes was adopted by the Continental Congress and became the national flag. 
-1811:  Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. Her mother died when she was five, and her father was a Congregational minister who preached anti-slavery sermons. In 1832, Harriet moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio. Ohio didn't allow slaves but Cincinnati was right across the Ohio River from Kentucky, which did allow slaves. Harriet saw slaves trying to escape north by running across the frozen river, and later discovered that her servant was a runaway slave. She moved to Maine after a couple of years, but her experiences in Cincinnati formed the basis for Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, which made it illegal for citizens of free states to give aid to runaway slaves. Harriet didn't like the new law and reacted by writing a book that humanized slavery by telling the story of individuals and families. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in serial form in 1851, and when the book came out in 1852 it became a huge best seller all across the world. It's about a slave who is bought and sold three times before being beaten to death by his last owner.
-1820: Bookseller John Bartlett, compiler of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations," was born. 
-1855: Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette was born.
-1906: Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White was born. 
-1909: Actor/folksinger Burl Ives was born. 
-1919: Capt. John Alcock and Lt. Arthur Brown flew a Vickers Vimy bomber 1,900 miles non-stop from St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada, to Clifden, Ireland, for the first non-stop trans- Atlantic flight.  Actress Dorothy McGuire in 1919 was born. 
-1933: Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski, born in Lodz, Poland. He's the author of The Painted Bird (1968), about a six year-old boy who becomes separated from his parents and wanders through the area along the Polish-Soviet border during World War II. He meets a series of cruel, violent peasants who subject him to all sorts of miseries and abuses, like hanging from a rafter just out of reach of a vicious dog. Kosinski claimed the book was based on his own experience, and for a long time it was considered to be a memoir. But later it was discovered that he made the whole story up: he had actually spent World War II in the comfort of his parents' home.
 Resources for Jerzy Kosinski: http://collaboratory.nunet.net/goals2000/eddy/Kosinski/Resources.html
-1938: The first presentation of the Caldecott Medal to Dorothy P. Lathrop for illustrations in Animals of the Bible.
-1941: American writer John Edgar Wideman, born in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the novels Sent for you Yesterday (1984) and Philadelphia Fire (1990). He has also published many books and articles on jazz, basketball, and race in America.
-1946: Actress Marla Gibbs and real estate mogul Donald Trump were born. 
-1947: American novelist Carolyn Chute, born in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the novels Snow Man (1999) and The Beans of Egypt Maine (1985), about a poor family who lives in a trailer home with Christmas lights up all year long. Carolyn Chute dropped out of high school and got married when she was 16 years old, worked on a potato farm for many years, and became a grandmother by the time she was 37.
-1948: Olympic gold medal speed skater Eric Heiden was born. 
-1951: Univac I, the world's first commercial computer, designed for the U.S. Census Bureau, was unveiled. 
-1961: Singer Boy George (George O'Dowd) was born.  
-1968: Actress Yasmine Bleeth ("Baywatch") was born. 
-1969: Tennis player Stephanie "Steffi" Graf was born.
-1982: Argentine forces surrendered to British troops on the disputed Falkland Islands.
-1983: Health Secretary Margaret Heckler said her department would give top priority to finding the cause and a cure for AIDS.
-1985: Shiite Moslem gunmen commandeered TWA Flight 847 carrying 153 passengers and crew from Athens to Rome. The ordeal ended 17 days later in Beirut, where one of the hostages, a U.S. sailor, was killed. 
-1990: Flash floods around Shadyside, Ohio, killed at leas 26 people and damaged or destroyed more than 800 homes in four eastern Ohio counties. 
-1991: NATO and five Eastern European nations approved a compromise, ending a dispute over a U.S.-Soviet treaty limiting conventional armies in Europe. 
-1993: President Clinton nominated federal Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. She succeeded retiring Justice Byron White. 
-1998: The Chicago Bulls won their sixth NBA title in eight years and third in a row, defeating the Utah Jazz in the championship round for the second year in a row. 
-1999: The South African National Assembly elected Thabo Mbeki as president, succeeding the retiring Nelson Mandela. Mbeki had served as deputy president under Mandela. 
-2000: The presidents of North and South Korea announced an agreement to work for peace and unity and also said they'd agreed to allow exchange visits by divided families.

June 15
-1763: Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa was born in Kashiwabara, Japan. He wrote over 20,000 haiku that celebrate the small wonders of life, and wrote under the pen name "Issa," which means "Cup-of-Tea."
Kobayashi Issa: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/koba.htm
-1902: Psychologist Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He argued that the human life cycle could be understood as a series of developmental stages, and coined the term "identity crisis."
-1904: More than 1,000 people died when fire erupted aboard the steamboat General Slocum in New York City's East River.
-1911: English children's author Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry was born in Romsey, Hampshire. He is remembered for writing stories about Thomas the Tank Engine and his locomotive friends. His father was a clergyman who loved trains and used to tell him stories of railway engines. He wrote 26 books on his own and collaborated with his son Christopher on 40 more.
-1920: American poet Amy Clampitt was born on a farm in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school but had quit by the time she graduated from Grinnell College. She moved to New York City, where she worked as a secretary, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. She began writing poetry again in the 1960s, and finally published her first collection, The Kingfisher in 1983, when she was 63 years old. She published five more celebrated books in the next twelve years.
Amy Clampitt: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=45
-1924: Native American Citizenship Day, recognizing the citizenship of Native Americans, was established.
-1947: Science writer Dava Sobel was born in New York City. Her mother was trained as a chemist and her father was a doctor. She was inspired by Carl Sagan to start writing about science for non-scientific people, and got a job writing about psychology and psychiatry for the New York Times. In 1996, she wrote Longitude, which tells how the 18th century scientist and clockmaker William Harrison solved the problem of determining east-west location at sea. Without longitude, many ships traveled so far off course that sailors would starve or die of scurvy before they reached land. Galileo's Daughter, published in 2000, is based on 124 letters from the hand of the daughter of the great Italian astronomer.

June 16
Bloomsday, celebrating James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which takes place on June 16th, 1904. Today in Dublin, people will celebrate the book by reading passages aloud, visiting all the places mentioned in the book, and eating the favorite foods of the character Leopold Bloom, such as kidneys and other innards of beasts. Joyce chose June 16th, 1904 for his novel because on that day he went on his first date with the love of his life, Nora Barnacle. A few days before, he had seen a tall beautiful woman with long red hair walking on Nassau Street. He stopped and talked to her, and they got together on the evening of June 16th. They walked out on the wide fields by the banks of the River Dodder as the sun was setting, and Joyce fell in love with her. The following October, just a few months after they'd met, they left Ireland together. She came from western Ireland, which most Dubliners considered the backward part of the country. Some people thought she wasn't smart enough for him, but Joyce loved her unrefined ways. He often wrote down things she said. She once said of a rundown apartment, "That place wasn't fit to wash a rat in." They lived like nomads in Rome, Zurich, Trieste, and Paris. He started writing Ulysses when he was thirty-six years old. It took him seven years to finish. He wanted to describe Dublin as accurately as he could. He wrote letters to friends asking for a list of shop names, street awnings, the number of steps leading down to 7 Eccles Street, and how long it took to walk from one part of the city to another. He used rhyming dictionaries, maps of Dublin, street directories, and Golberts "Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland." For the final "Molly Bloom" section of the book, he borrowed Nora's unpunctuated writing style and quoted from many of her letters. By the time he finished, his eyesight was so poor that he had to write in different colored inks to see what he had written.
James Joyce's Ulysses in Hypermedia: http://publish.uwo.ca/%7Emgroden/ulysses/
-1933: President Roosevelt opened his New Deal recovery program, signing bank, rail, and industry bills and initiating farm aid.
-1938: Joyce Carol Oates was born in Millersport, New York. She's known for novels and short stories in which people's lives are torn apart by violence. She's the author of books such as Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). The book that had the most profound influence on her life and her writing was Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. She read it when she was about ten years old, and loved how Alice was calm and rational when facing nightmarish situations. She said that Alice's calmness made a strong impression, and ever since she has tried to write about nightmares and bizarre things in a coherent, calm way.
Joyce Carol Oates: http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/southerr/jco.bio.html

June 17
-1871: Poet James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. Over the course of his life he was a teacher, school principal, journalist, lawyer, songwriter, diplomat, novelist, poet, civil rights crusader, anthologist, and professor. There was no high school in Jacksonville for black students when Johnson was growing up, so his parents sent him to Atlanta University to finish his secondary education. He returned to Jacksonville to work as a teacher, and eventually built a high school there. At the same time, he was studying law and in 1898, he became the first African American since Reconstruction to be admitted to the Florida bar. In 1901, Johnson went to New York with his brother to write songs and perform in a ragtime song and dance act. He wrote more than 200 songs, including "Lift Every Voice and Sing" which has been called the Negro National Anthem. He also got involved in politics and worked for the Teddy Roosevelt Administration, as an American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 1912, Johnson published a novel called The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). It was about a light-skinned black man who passes for white. Johnson worked for the NAACP. He lobbied for the anti-lynching bill that was killed by a filibuster in the Senate, and he investigated war crimes that had been committed by the United States in Haiti. Between his travels and bureaucratic work and speech writing, he managed to compile anthologies such as The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), which was the first collection of poetry by African Americans ever made. He also edited the The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925). Many critics consider his masterpiece God's Trombones (1927) in which he wrote seven poems based on sermons. He had always loved the way black preachers talked, and he wanted to use that style in his poetry.
James Weldon Johnson: http://www.nku.edu/%7Ediesmanj/johnson.html
-1914: Novelist and journalist John Hersey wsa born in Tianjin, (TYAHN-jin), China. His parents were missionaries in China and Hersey learned to speak Chinese before he learned English. After college Hersey became a war correspondent to China and Japan, and he covered World War II for Time and Life magazines. He became known for describing real people as though they were characters in a novel. In 1945, Hersey began to do research for a book about postwar Japan. He found a document written by a Jesuit missionary who had survived the atom bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. Hersey found the priest, who was recovering from radiation sickness, and the priest introduced him to many more survivors. Hersey chose six survivors from the many he talked to, and told their stories as simply and factually as he could in a book called Hiroshima (1946). Hiroshima was incredibly popular. Albert Einstein ordered 1000 copies and distributed them personally to everyone he knew. When newspapers serialized it, Hersey donated all the proceeds to the American Red Cross.
Biography of John Hersey: http://jhhs.dist214.k12.il.us/AboutJHHS/Biography/biography.html
-1917: Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas. A prolific writer, she as also very active in bringing poetry workshops to inner city youth, and sending the message that poetry is an art form for all to use and enjoy.
Lesson Plan-Gwendolyn Brooks:
http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/TLresources/longterm/LessonPlans/famous/gbrooks.html
Urban Poet: http://www.riverdeep.net/current/2001/02/022601_m_brooks.jhtml
-1928: Amelia Earhart embarked on the first trans-Atlantic flight by a woman. She flew from Newfoundland to Wales in about 21 hours.
-1942: Poet Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He's the author of collections of poetry such as Triangles in the Afternoon (1979), How to Be a Woodpecker (1983), and You Never Know (2002).

June 18
-1812: The US declared war with Great Britain over violation of US rights on sea.
-1815: Napoleon Bonaparte lost his final major battle near Waterloo Village in Belgium. One of the most famous Emperors of all time, there are an estimated forty-five thousand books about him. He's one of the only historical people we remember by his first name. Napoleon took command of the French army after the French revolution, and was the first military leader in Europe to use commoners as officers. He believed that in order to inspire his men, the officers of his army should be dressed in beautiful uniforms, and they should all carry the same flag. In 1799, Napoleon became dictator of France, and in 1804 he declared himself emperor. From 1805 onward, he started invading and attacking almost everyone in Europe. England, Germany, Russia, Spain. His invasion of Russia became the subject of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. After a series of defeats, Napoleon abdicated the throne and went to live on the island of Elba. He took long salt baths and read "The Arabian Nights". After a year in exile, he got bored and went back to France. He gathered an army and marched north toward Belgium at Waterloo, where the allied armies of England and Germany were waiting for him. A heavy rain fell the evening before the battle, so Napoleon delayed his attack until the morning of June 18th. His army and the English army fought for ten hours, and Napoleon would have won, but the rain delay allowed the Prussians time to arrive and help the British win the battle. Napoleon lost twenty-five thousand men. He signed a second abdication in Paris and went to live on the remote island of St. Helena off the coast of Africa.
-1937: Novelist Gail Godwin was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She's the author of A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) and The Good Husband (1994).
Gail Godwin: http://www.gailgodwin.com/
-1942: Film critic Roger Ebert was born in Urbana, Illinoi. He dropped out of graduate school at the University of Chicago to become a journalist for the Chicago Sun Times and he became the newspaper's film critic. In 1975, he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. He's the author of many collections of movie reviews, including I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie (2000).
-1948: Adoption of the Library Bill of Rights.
-1949: Children's author and illustrator Chris Van Allsberg was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He's the author of the children's books Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985).
-1953: Amy Bloom was born in New York City. She's the author of the novel Love Invents Us (1996) and the collection of short stories A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (2000). She is a practicing psychotherapist and began writing fiction in her spare time. Many of the characters she writes about suffer from mental illness.
Interview: Amy Bloom: http://www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum2.html
-1983: Dr. Sally Ride became the first woman in space, aboard the Challenger for a six-day mission.
Dr. Sally Ride: http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/ride.html

June 19
-1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.

June 20
-1782: The Continental Congress approved the Great Seal of the US that adorns the back of the $1 bill.
-1893: in 1893 when a jury in New Bedford, Massachusetts found Lizzie Borden innocent of the murders of Abby and Andrew Borden. It was one of the first widely publicized murder trials in the United States, and it inspired the nursery rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an ax
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
she gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie Borden was the youngest daughter of the family, but she was in her thirties at the time of the murders. She never married and lived at home. She spent her time volunteering at the local hospital and teaching Sunday school. Her father was the president of a bank and one of the richest and stingiest men in town. Despite his wealth, he and his family lived in a small cramped house with no running water. He liked to pick up junk on the road and resell it for extra cash, and there was a broken padlock in his pocket on the day he died. On a Thursday morning, August 4, 1892, Mr. Borden went to work in the morning. He came home a few hours later and took a nap on the couch. At about 11:15 AM, Lizzie began calling out to her neighbors saying that her father had been killed. When the police arrived, his wife's body was found upstairs, also dead. Mrs. Borden had actually received eighteen whacks with a hatchet, and Mr. Borden had received ten. By 2:15 that same day, the local newspaper had already published a story about the incident. Two days later, newspaper reporters began to speculate on the guilt of Lizzie. She had been in the house at the time of the murders, she had a lot of money to gain, and it turned out that she had recently tried to buy poison at the pharmacy. The case soon became a national story, covered by newspapers all over the country. The police based their case entirely on circumstantial evidence, and they failed to convince the jury. Lizzie was acquitted on June 20, 1894. Some people believed that a jury was simply unwilling to condemn a woman to hang. No one else was ever tried for the murder. After the trial, Lizzie bought herself a three-story mansion, where she had running water for the first time in her life. The town of Fall River, Massachusetts was ashamed of her until her death, but the house where the murders occurred is now a bed and breakfast and museum. Lizzie Borden has been the subject of a Broadway play, an opera, a novel, and a ballet. The nursery rhyme about her appears in an English textbook for Japanese students, where it is credited to Mother Goose.
-1951: Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, Ireland. He's the author of many collections of poetry including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Paul Muldoon: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/%7Eangl/muldoon/muldoon.htm
-1952: Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta, India. He's the author of the novels A Suitable Boy (1993) and An Equal Music (2000).
Vikram Seth: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0599/seth/

June 21
-1906: Billy Wilder Film director, screenwriter, producer was born in Vienna, Austria.  He became a specialist in cowriting and directing incisive dramas, acerbic comedies, and bittersweet romances, then later turned to farce. In the late 1950s he became his own producer. His Academy Awards came with The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and The Apartment (1960).
-1947: Meredith Baxter, actress, was born. She had enormous success with her role as hippie mom Elyse Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties (1982-89). Baxter and actor Michael Gross were cast as the liberal parents of conservative children (played by relative newcomers, including Michael J. Fox, Justine Bateman and Tina Yothers).  After the series’ acclaimed seven-year run, Baxter returned to TV movies in an attempt to land more serious roles. 
-1953: Cyndi Lauper pop singer, songwriter was born.  Her hits include "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "Time After Time."
-1982: Prince William of Wales Second in line to the throne of England, was born Prince William Arthur Philip Louis Windsor, the eldest son of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Charles, Prince of Wales. His official title is His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales. 

June 22
-1807: The U.S. frigate Chesapeake was fired upon and then boarded by the crew of the British battleship Leopold about 40 miles east of Chesapeake Bay. 
-1856: English adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard ("King Solomon's Mines," "She") was born.
-1898: German novelist Erich Remarque ("All Quiet on the Western Front") was born. 
-1907: Author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh, and movie producer Mike Todd, were born. 
-1913: Actor Karl Malden was born.
-1918: 53 circus performers and many circus animals were killed when an empty troop train rear-ended the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train, which was stopped in Ivanhoe, Ind., to fix its brakes. 
-1922: Fashion designer Bill Blass was born. 
-1933: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was born. 
-1936: Singer/actor Kris Kristofferson was born. 
-1940: During World War II, Adolf Hitler gained a stunning victory as France was forced to sign an armistice eight days after German forces overran Paris.
-1941: Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In 1973, President Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a pledge to try to avoid nuclear war.  TV reporter Ed Bradley was born.
-1949: Actresses Meryl Streep and Lindsay Wagner were born.
-1954: Actor Freddie Prinze was born. 
-1960: Actress Tracy Pollan was born.
-1990: South African police tightened security around President de Klerk and detained 11 right-wing activists after a published report detailed an alleged plot to assassinate de Klerk and black nationalist Nelson Mandela. 
-1991: The South African government, Inkatha Freedom party and ANC met for the first time in Johannesburg to discuss a way to end factional violence. 
-1994: Former President Carter persuaded North Korea to meet with South Korea as part of a breakthrough in the controversy over North Korea's nuclear-development sites. In a major upset at the World Cup soccer tournament, the United States defeated Columbia, 2-1. 

June 23
-1894: The Duke of Windsor was born.
-1910: News reporter Edward P. Morgan was born.
-1927: Director and choreographer Bob Fosse was born.
-1940: Singer Adam Faith (Terence Nelhams) and Olympic track and field Gold Medalist Wilma Rudolph were born.
-1948: US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was born.

June 24
Museum Comes To Life Day

June 25:
-1876: Lt. Col. George A. Custer and his 7th Cavalry were wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in the Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana.
-1903: George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, was born.

June 26:
National Chocolate Pudding Day
-1819: Abner Doubleday, American soldier and inventor of baseball in 1839, was born.
-1824: Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist for whom the temperature scale is named, was born.

June 27:
-1880: Helen Keller, author of The Story of My Life, was born.
-1922: The first presentation of the Newbery Medal to Hendrik van Loon for The Story of Mankind.
-1950: President Truman ordered the Air Force and Navy into the Korean War following a call from the United Nations Security Council for member nations to help South Korea repel an invasion from the North.

June 28
-1712: Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born today in Geneva, Switzerland. While he is often associated with the idea of the "noble savage"--of a good, basic state of man in nature before the influences of society--he actually changed his perspective with his later works,
contending that nature was brutish, without morality.
-1919: The Treaty of Versailles was signed in France, ending World War I.

June 29
-1853: The U.S. Senate ratified the $10 million Gadsden Purchase from Mexico, adding more than 29,000 square miles to the territories of Arizona and New Mexico and completing the modern geographical boundaries of the contiguous 48 states. 
-1861: William Mayo, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., was born. 
-1868: Astronomer George Ellery Hale, founder of the Yerkes and Mount Palomar observatories, was born. 
-1900: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, was born.
-1901: Actor/singer Nelson Eddy was born. 
-1910: Broadway songwriter Frank Loesser was born.
-1919: Actor Slim Pickens was born. 
-1941: "Black power" advocate Stokely Carmichael was born. 
-1944: Actor Gary Busey was born. 
-1946: Two years before Israel became a nation, British authorities arrested more than 2,700 Jewish Zionists in an effort to stop terrorism in Palestine. 
-1948: Actor-turned-congressman Fred Grandy was born. 
-1962: Actress Sharon Lawrence ("NYPD Blue") was born.
-1970: The last American troops were withdrawn from Cambodia into South Vietnam. 
-1972: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment, as then administered by individual states, was unconstitutional. 
-1991: The European Community announced $1.4 billion in aid for the Soviet Union. 
-1992: The U.S. Supreme Court left intact the important aspects of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion, but upheld most of Pennsylvania's new restrictions on a woman's right to abortion.  Doctors in Pittsburgh reported the world's first transplant of a baboon liver into a human patient. The recipient, a 35-year-old man, survived three months.  The president of Algeria was assassinated during a speech. 
-1994: The Japanese Diet, or parliament, elected Tomiichi Murayama as prime minister.  
-1995: Editors of the New York Times and Washington Post said they were considering publishing the UNAbomber's manifesto in hopes of ending the bombings.  The U.S. shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir. 
-1999: A Turkish court convicted Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan of treason and sentenced him to death.

June 30
-1859: Frenchman Jean Francois Gravelet, known professionally as the Great Blondin, became the first daredevil to walk across Niagara Falls on a tight rope.
-1870: Ada Kepley became the first woman to graduate from an accredited law school in the United States: Union College of Law in Chicago.
-1893: English socialist leader Harold Laski was born.
-1896: Film director Howard Hawks was born.
-1917: Drummer Buddy Rich and singer Lena Horne were born.
-1919: Actress Susan Hayward was born.
-1927: Tennis champion Shirley Fry was born.
-1934: Hitler ordered a bloody purge of his own political party, assassinating hundreds of Nazis whom he feared might become political enemies some day.
-1936: Actress Nancy Dussault was born. Margaret Mitchell's Civil War novel "Gone With the
Wind" was published.
-1940: Former Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., was born.
-1943: Singer Florence Ballard of The Supremes was born.
-1947: Actor William Atherton was born.
-1950: American troops were moved from Japan to help defend South Korea against the invading North Koreans.
-1955: Actor David Alan Grier was born.
-1966: Former heavyweight champion boxer Mike Tyson was born. As a youth, Tyson joined a street gang at a very early age and was in trouble with the law many times before he was 12 years old. After an arrest for armed robbery, he was sent to the Tyron School in 1978, a correction center for juveniles in upstate New York. It was there that his life changed direction. On March 4, 1985, Tyson stepped into the ring for his first professional fight. He had studied boxing history
and watched old newsreel footage of the great fighters of the past and wanted to emulate them. He entered the ring without fanfare, without a robe, without socks, dressed in black with
the most menacing and intimidating glare in boxing.
-1971: Soviet cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev lost their lives as they started the reentry procedures in their spacecraft Soyuz 11. They had launched on June 6 and docked with the spacestation Salyut 1, which was sent to orbit up the preceding April. After spending 23 days aboard the space station, they were on their way back when a valve opened as they blew explosive bolts to seperate the reentry capsule from the remainder of the craft. The capsule started to rapidly depressurize. Patseyev tried unsuccesfully to close the valve by hand. The three died within minutes. The Soviets sent nobody into space for the next two years, and never sent anybody back to Salyut 1.
-1992: Fidel Ramos was inaugurated as the eighth Philippine president in the first peaceful transfer of power in a generation.
-1994: The U.S. Figure Skating Association stripped Tonya Harding of her 1994 national championship title.
-1997: In Hong Kong, the Union Jack was lowered for the last time over Government House as Britain prepared to hand the colony back to China after ruling it for 156 years.
-2002: Brazil won its fifth World Cup soccer championship with a 2-0 victory over Germany.

Drink it Up??
PROJECT BEGIN and END DATES: 10/01/04 to 6/01/07
NUMBER OF CLASSROOMS: No limit
AGE RANGE: 11 to 20 years
TARGET AUDIENCE: Anyone
PROJECT SUMMARY:
This project encourages global participation for schools to learn about their local drinking water. Classes are encouraged to test their drinking water, and to post their results to our database- for others to use as real data.
PROJECT LEVEL: Basic Project
CURRICULUM AREAS:
-- Language; Science; Technology; Information Technology; Community Interest
TECHNOLOGIES USED:
-- Email, List server; Live Audio/Video Conference; Live Text Conference: IRC, Chat; Desktop Document Sharing; Discussion Forum; Text: stories, essays, letters; Spreadsheet: data, analysis; Student created Webs; Web-published
COLLABORATION STYLES:
-- Electronic Appearance or Q & A; Information Exchange; Database Creation; Pooled Data Analysis; Information Search; Parallel Problem Solving; Virtual Meeting or Gathering; Global Classroom; Electronic Publishing
FULL PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
-- Each participating class will research their local drinking water. Classes will determine where their water comes from, learn about their local watershed, and will determine what is in their drinking water.
Each class should submit their findings into the projects database for all classes to compare.
Each class will also submit a group project as a web page about their research complete with pictures, maps and diagrams. (focusing on the watershed and water-testing)
(full participation is not required, though it is recommended!)
OBJECTIVES:
-- Use the Internet and the library as research tools.
Use maps and other geographic representations, tools and technologies to acquire, process and report information.
Learn how conditions that exist in one system influence the conditions that exist in other systems.
Learn the ways in which plants and animals reshape the landscape Analyze the spatial organization of people, places, and environments on Earth's surface.
Understand that a brief change in the limited resources of an ecosystem may alter the size of a population or the average size of individual organisms and that long-term change may result in the elimination of animal and plant populations inhabiting the Earth.
Understand that humans are a part of an ecosystem and their activities may deliberately or inadvertently alter the equilibrium in ecosystems.
Improve keyboarding skills.
Where possible, to learn how to scan and send photos and/or drawings
PROJECT URL: http://www.millennium.scps.k12.fl.us/staffpages/ShawR/drinkitup/
REGISTRATION DATES: 10/01/04 to 6/01/07
REGISTRATION INSTRUCTIONS: You may join online or email
PROJECT EMAIL ADDRESS: mailto:Rosemary_Shaw@scps.k12.fl.us
PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT POSTED BY:
-- Rosemary Shaw mailto:rosemary_shaw@scps.k12.fl.us (Teacher Middle School (ages 11-14))
-- rosemary_shaw@scps.k12.fl.us
-- Sanford, Florida, United States

Lucky Ladybugs
PROJECT BEGIN and END DATES: 3/15/07 to 11/30/07 (must register by 6/01/07)
NUMBER OF CLASSROOMS: No limit
AGE RANGE: 5 to 12 years
TARGET AUDIENCE: Anyone
PROJECT SUMMARY:
-- This project will demonstrate lesson plans designed following principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and examples of student work resulting from the lessons.
PROJECT LEVEL: Basic Project
CURRICULUM AREAS: Language; Mathematics; Science; Technology
TECHNOLOGIES USED:
-- Email, List server; Live Text Conference: IRC,Chat,IM; Discussion Forum; Text: stories, essays, letters; Graphics: photo, draw, paint; Audio: files, clips, CDs, tapes; Video: files, clips, CDs, tapes;
Web-published; Blogs
COLLABORATION STYLES:
-- Information Exchange; Virtual Meeting or Gathering; Electronic Publishing
FULL PROJECT DESCRIPTION: kids-learn.org/ladybugs/project.htm
OBJECTIVES: kids-learn.org/ladybugs/project.htm
PROJECT URL: http://kids-learn.org/ladybugs
REGISTRATION DATES: 2/27/07 to 6/01/07
REGISTRATION INSTRUCTIONS: Please read information on: kids-learn.org/ladybugs/project.htm
PROJECT EMAIL ADDRESS: mailto:luckyladybugs2007@yahoo.com
PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT POSTED BY:
Susan Silverman mailto:susansilverman@yahoo.com (College Professor)
NYIT
Old Westbury, New York, United States

Native American Tribes of North America Database
PROJECT BEGIN and END DATES: 9/05/06 to 6/15/08
NUMBER OF CLASSROOMS: 50
AGE RANGE: 8 to 12 years
TARGET AUDIENCE: International: Canada; United States
PROJECT SUMMARY:
-- Participating classes will help create a database of information on Native American tribes. This information will be posted on the web in a user friendly format for everyone to use. Contributing
classes/students will provide basic information in a simple designated format. Each contributing student will be credited on the site right with their research along with the name of their teacher and school.
PROJECT LEVEL: Basic Project
CURRICULUM AREAS:
-- Social Studies; Technology; Information Technology; Community Interest; History; Multicultural Studies
TECHNOLOGIES USED:
-- Email, List server; Desktop Document Sharing; Database: data, analysis; Text: stories, essays, letters
COLLABORATION STYLES:
-- Information Exchange; Database Creation; Information Search
OBJECTIVES:
-- The objective is to create a database of information on Native American Tribes in a user friendly format for students around the country/s to use. This databased will be maintained by the Etiwanda School District. The URL will be provided at the start of the project.
REGISTRATION DATES: 7/23/06 to 5/29/08
REGISTRATION INSTRUCTIONS:
-- send me an email of your desire to participate and let me know which tribe you will research and I will send you the worksheet via email to be completed and returned.
PROJECT EMAIL ADDRESS: mailto:pamela_aurangzeb@etiwanda.k12.ca.us
PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT POSTED BY:
Pamela Aurangzeb mailto:pamela_aurangzeb@etiwanda.k12.ca.us
(Teacher Elementary/Primary (ages 5-12))
Grapeland Elementary
Rancho Cucamonga, California, United States

This site began in March 1998 by Janet Luch. This page was last updated on April 28, 2007 .
Email comments and questions to studyplans@yahoo.com.