"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein

Intuition? Psychic powers? Instinct? Premonition? Whatever it was, Alyssa Maske and Denise Krebs had it in spades today! Denise challenged us via Twitter to use our imaginations and discover the story within one of her 8th grade students' video blogs. Nicole's animoto was really neat, with alternating pictures showing fireworks, flowers, a diamond ring, balloons... and a baboon! The music in the background sounded like a Spanish love song, but my students were pretty fixated on the monkey. :) We were having a difficult time using our imaginations to develop a story that really made sense with the whole video (Most consisted of the gruesome death of a monkey thanks to our classroom of hard-core hunter boys...) and just when Mrs. Sigler was developing a bit of frustration, in flew an email from Mrs. Maske and her class of Sophomore Spanish students to save the day!

Mrs. Maske's class is just starting to discover their genius and they wanted to meet us via Skype! What a FANTASTICALLY TIMED email!!! We asked the Sophomore geniuses to decipher the song for us and we found out it was about a princess trying to find a prince to give her love to. When we Skyped them in this afternoon, they shared their thoughts with us about what the story could be. There was some fun collaboration between the students, and the Sophomores were so kind and respectful to our whole class. We saw that they were creative and curious about the story, just like us, and they had so much imagination to share today... True geniuses! They also used technology to share our final story on typewith.me so we could see their great writing at work.

We later created posters to hang up around our building to tell other students and teachers about their genius. At one point, Ben came up to me and said enthusiastically, "I'm going to make my poster into a paper airplane and when kids open it, it will say 'YOU are a genius!'". I actually drew in a breath, fully intending to tell him that paper airplane posters are unacceptable and certainly not hang-upable (Mrs. Sigler is still learning...), then changed my words at the last minute to "Wow, Ben! That's very creative and I can tell you're using your imagination today!" It turned into an absolutely amazing poster - He even cut a pilot out of a notecard and stuck him in the plane. It's one of the neatest posters I've ever seen in my life and is totally guaranteed to make students stop in the hallway to read.

Did you ever imagine such great things could come from a simple change in the words you use?! On Monday we'll be full of wonder. We'd like to challenge you to open your eyes this weekend to the wonder around you... Let us know what you see!