Q4 Midterm Update

Hi all--

While I sit here at home on this gorgeous day, sniffling away with a nasty head-cold for the third day in a row, I decided I could at least update my blog...

We only have 4.5 weeks left of the school year! I hope-- and I think-- that we have made gains in learning about history and geography this year. In this post I'll just give you a little run-down of what we've been up to and what we have left to cover in the next month and a half...

7th grade: We finished up learning about The Roaring 20s by learning how to do The Charleston; the kids really loved this activity, by and large. We pushed all the desks and chairs up against the walls of my classroom, looked at a bunch of different pictures of flappers, wrote and discussed dance today and how it reflects our culture and society, and later compared and contrasted that to how dances like The Charleston reflected American culture and society in the 1920s. Then we watched some youtube clips of Ginger Rogers dancing The Charleston, and tried to follow written directions to learn to dance it; we had some adept and brave students (who are dancers themselves) perform a much better demonstration for the class than anything I could've ever cooked up! So thank you to those students!

Then we did a stock market simulation, where students got to familiarize themselves with some basic stock market vocabulary, design a company and product, and invest fake money in other peoples' companies; the next day they got to find out which companies failed in the Crash of '29, and which succeeded. This transitioned us nicely into watching a PBS documentary entitled, The Crash of 1929 (from the series The 1930s); students responded to critical thinking questions during and after watching the film.

With the substitute today and yesterday, 7th graders continued reading about life for German people during the rise of the Nazis in the memoir, On Hitler's Mountain; they also read two chapters from our Hakim textbook-- "Down and Out", and "Economic Disaster", both about The Great Depression-- while recording most important facts from each chapter and Heard, Not Heard, Hero, Villain for each chapter.

When I get back tomorrow, I plan to play the song, "We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover", from the musical, Annie (Fun Fact: I was Annie in my high school's production when I was a senior in high school. If you read this far, let me know and I'll give you a prize :) ) We'll have a brief discussion about "Hoovervilles" and look at some primary sources from The Great Depression; the primary source set that I have is from a company called Jackdaw, if you want to google search that...

Once we finish up with The Great Depression and the New Deal, we'll spend the remainder of the year learning about WW2 at home and abroad. With that we'll read Linda Sue Park's, When My Name Was Keoko.


8th grade: We are nearly finished reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is about life in a Soviet gulag (prison/work camp in Siberia).

We have also learned quite a bit about McCarthyism and the controversy sparked by Senator Joseph McCarthy's methods of "hunting" alleged communists in the U.S. government and media. Along with this we learned quite a bit about the life and work of journalist Edward R. Murrow and his producer and friend, Fred Friendly. We watched an A & E Biography of Murrow, read a chapter in the Hakim text about McCarthyism, and watched the movie Good Night, and Good Luck, which I highly recommend if you haven't yet seen it yourself, parents and guardians. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Murrow and Friendly story, they worked for CBS and basically exposed McCarthy on national television, and are credited with effectively ending his influence in the Senate; it was a highly controversial undertaking at the time.)

Since I've been gone this week the 8th graders have had time to do Geography Choreography for their map quiz tomorrow over major world deserts, and today are reading two chapters from the Hakim textbook called, "Liking Ike", and "Houses, Kids, Cars, and Fast Food", both predictably about life in the U.S. during the 1950s, post-WW2 (the Baby Boomers and all that). They are doing the same partner-read/note-taking activity as the 7th graders, though they are studying a different time period.

We have a lot to do in this last month in 8th grade! We'll learn briefly about the Korean War, then spend more time on JFK's presidency (including the Space Race, Sputnik, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, assassination), the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. (including Malcolm X and MLK Jr.; we'll be doing A Raisin in the Sun as a readers' theater along with this); the 1960s and the counter-culture movements (i.e. hippies); we'll spend a few days learning about the Vietnam War, mention the fall of the Berlin Wall, and try to discuss the 1980s very briefly at the end of the quarter. Whew!


So that's a more in-depth version of this week's newsletter, for those of you who are interested. Now I will return to trying to sleep off this pesky bug...

Thanks for reading,
Leah Hood

Legislative Draft Update: Final Phase!

We are in the written analysis stage of our year-long project. Below are the questions to which students must respond for each article, bill, or law that they are choosing to include as a part of their project. Students can have any combination of articles, bills, and laws, provided all have something to do with the natural environment. Students are required to do a written analysis for three articles, bills, or laws from each of their three states-- for a total of nine write-ups.

Here is what the form looks like:

Name:

Legislative Draft—Written Analysis

--*STAPLE THE ARTICLE, BILL, OR LAW TO THS BACK SIDE OF THIS PAGE.*--

Directions:
*Thoughtfully respond to the questions below.
*Use complete sentences.
*Use the space provided; no one word or one sentence responses.
*If you don’t understand something, it is your responsibility to ask for help.

1) What is the main idea of this document (the article, bill, or law)?




2) Summarize this document.











3) What is the problem described? (Or what are the problems described?)






4) Do you think this is an important problem? Why or why not?


5) What solution (if any) is being proposed in this document?








6) Do you think the proposed solution is a good solution or not? Do you think it is going to solve the problem? Why or why not?








7) What do you think the best way to solve this problem would be?










8) Do you think this problem will still be around fifty years from now? Why or why not?