January

National Book Month

   


  2. Kakizome (First Writing Day) in Japan.
    Write your favorite poem in your best handwriting.

  3. Alaska Admission Day, 1959.
    What is the capital of our 49th state?

  4. Jacob Grimm's birthday.
    Louis Braille's Birthday.
    How do blind people read the Braille's alphabet?

  5. George Washington Carver died today in 1943. He invented peanut butter.


  7. Universal Letter Writing Week. Find kids pen pals by visiting Epals or writing to World Pen Friends, P.O. Box 337, Saugerties, NY 12477.


  9. The first hot-air balloon flight in the United States was made January 9, 1793.


  11. Today in 1964, cigarettes were first declared hazardous to one's health. Visit American Cancer Society and then create posters for school.

  12. Charles Perrault's birthday. He wrote the original Mother Goose tales.
    Horror stories are cool. Pass around a paper that says, "Nobody was prepared for it when it came...." and ask everyone to add a sentence.

  13. Poet N.M. Bodecker's birthday. Read his beloved rhyming story Hurry, Hurry Mary Dear, and then make up your own nonsense rhymes.


  15. Martin Luther King Birthday.


  17. Benjamin Franklin's Birthday.
    Name one of his inventions.

  18. It's the birthday of Peter Mark Roget, (books by this author) born in London (1779). His name is attached to the Thesaurus, but he had a long career as a physician and a scientist before he compiled it. As a younger man, he experimented with laughing gas, figured out how to improve the public water supply, invented the log-log slide rule, and wrote a paper which was the first to describe the persistence of images on the retina, thought to have been the first step toward the development of the movie camera. In Roget's Thesaurus you can find all sorts of suggestions for words that you want synonyms for. For "talk," he suggests: "chatter, chat, prate, prattle, patter, babble, gab, gabble, gibble-gabble, jabber, blab, blabber, blather, blether, clatter, run on, rattle on, ramble on, run on like a mill race, talk till one is blue in the face."A.A. Milne's birthday. Winnie-the-Pooh was based on Milne's son's stuffed bear. Try writing an adventure story about a favorite stuffed animal.

    "A Time to Talk," by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt).

    When a friend calls to me from the road
    And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
    I don't stand still and look around
    On all the hills I haven't hoed,
    And shout from where I am, 'What is it?'
    No, not as there is a time to talk.
    I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
    Blade-end up and five feet tall,
    And plod: I go up to the stone wall
    For a friendly visit.

  19. The life-changing invention, the tin can, was patented today in 1825.




  23. John Hancock's Birthday.
    Who has the neatest signature in you class?

  24. Today in 1848, the California gold rush began. Take a virtual tour of the Oakland Museum's exhibit "Gold Rush!" at California Untold Stories of the Gold Rush

  25. Today in 1915, Alexander Graham Bell made the first cross-country telephone call.

  26. Today in 1784, Ben Franklin wrote that the turkey should be our national symbol.

  27. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday. Sample the great composer's music online at Mozart's Music
    He composed music when he was five years old.
    What's a prodigy


  28. National Kazoo Day
    1986 Challenger Blew Up

  29. The Baseball Hall of Fame was established oin 1936. Over 200 men have received the nonor of induction into this famous hall.
    * Rosemary Well's birthday. She wrote Noisy Nora and shy Charles.

  30. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Birthday.
    How many terms did our 32nd President serve?
    Mohandas K. Gandhi Assassinated on Jan 30, 1948 (B Oct 2, 1869)

  31. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Canada was -62*f in 1947 in the Yukon Territory.
    * Jackie Robinson's birthday. Read a biography of the first African American to play major-league baseball at National Baseball Hall of Fame

3. Juneau
17. Franklin stove
18. Winnie-the-Pooh
30. pig
31. He served four terms.

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