NOVEMBER: Marc Brown, creator of Arthur

It's November 25th, and it's Marc Brown's birthday, you know, the creator and author of Arthur.

NOVEMBER: Mickey Mouse's Birthday

On November 18, 1928, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse was born forever changing the face of cartoons. There is so much students can do on Mickey Mouse's birthday, and activities range from pre-school to high school.



Find a story about Mickey Mouse and explore his creation. Find these stories online or go to the Disney Archive to read about Mickey Mouse. TIME magazine posted "A Brief History of Mickey Mouse" that you may also want to consider.

Consider working on a KWL chart as a group, since students may already know some quick facts about Mickey Mouse. Once this is done, students can color a picture of Mickey Mouse and write down a single fact about what they learned about him. Consider buying a coloring book and distribute various images of Mickey Mouse, or you may choose to make a copy of a single image and have students create a background for Mickey Mouse. Don't make this activity just about coloring and writing, find this opportunity to explore character descriptions, history, and the biography of Walt Disney.

For older students, perhaps consider having students look into the biography of Walt Disney. Students can also establish a time line Walt Disney animation of Mickey Mouse, from Steamboat Willie to current exposure like the Disney channel. Interactive time line websites like Timetoast have great potential for activities like this. Plenty of information about Walt Disney is available at this Walt Disney website.



There is so much history, culture, and influence of what came of Walt Disney and Mickey mouse. Take this opportunity to explore it and allow your students to learn a bit about popular culture icon. In the end, treat students to a clip of a Disney film, or play a board like Screenlife games like Scene It? which is known create trivia around movie and television show. They have a Disney version. If anything, use the DVD to help with trivia questions.

NOVEMBER: National "unfriend" Day

Technically National Unfriend Day is not something official, but when a celebrity with his own talk show, who was once on a popular Los Angeles radio station, and is known by face and name, the likes of Jimmy Kimmel can make anything happen.

(Just give it some time before this occasion gets posted on Wikipedia)

For example, he can get the California (soon-out-of-office) State Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to (humorously) be part of the Unfriend Day occasion:



How would this occasion be applied to educators?

I suggest to take this time to discuss social networking and the pro and cons of "friending" and "unfriending" people online. This would also be a great opportunity to discuss with your students how we do this outside the social networking world and how that effects people in our society.

Discuss the meaning of friendship and what it means in person and what it means online. For example, my nephew accepted the "friend request" from someone who says is annoying at his school. He explained to me that although this kid is annoying at school, the kid is not harmful and does not disrespect his peers. For those reasons, he accepted the classmate's request.



Address the benefits of social networking, and how people abuse it causing people to "unfriend" others.

Some people get offended when others "delete" people from their social networking profiles. Perhaps create activities of how this would reflect the person who did the deleting and the person who was deleted.

There is so much to cover regarding social networking, and as the internet grows and network connections expands, considering "unfriend" Day. As stated in this CNN.com article:

"Facebook was once the social networking site we chose over MySpace to connect with our real friends; but over the years, many of us have accumulated dozens, if not hundreds, of Facebook friends that are, in fact, not actually our friends."

Something to think about.