Welcome back from a beautiful Spring Break!
I hope you all had as restful and enjoyable a break as I did. I often fill my breaks with trainings and travels, but this time I took it easy. It felt really nice. I visited some friends and family in Iowa, but aside from that I just putzed around, really :)
Here's a summary of what we'll be studying during Q4 in Social Studies:
7th Grade:
This quarter in 7th grade Social Studies we'll be concentrating on the 1930s and 1940s. We spent most of last quarter studying U.S. history in the 1920s, covering topics such as Women's Suffrage, Prohibition, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929. We'll start of this new quarter looking at the Dust Bowl, Great Depression, and New Deal; all that will take us up until about midterm. Then the latter half of this last quarter we'll focus on WW2-- an epic topic. We'll look at WW2 from the angles of the European and Pacific theaters, "the homefront" in the U.S., and marginally from "the rest of the world", including places such as Africa and Central and South America (places less directly impacted by the war). We will, of course, learn about the Holocaust during this unit, and will also look at the Japanese internment camps in the U.S.; after we finish up reading The Truth About Sparrows, students will choose from one of four WW2-themed novels and participate in Literature Circles. Book choices include: The Diary of Anne Frank, On Hitler's Mountain, When My Name Was Keoko, and A Farewell to Manzanar.
8th Grade:
This quarter in 8th grade Social Studies we'll be concentrating on the 1960s-80s U.S. and world history. Last quarter we concentrated on the early Cold War in the U.S. and abroad; in Language Arts students read The Red Scarf Girl, which supported our Social Studies unit on Mao's China; in Social Studies we learned a lot about the Soviet Union and McCarthyism in the U.S., and finished off last quarter learning about the Korean War, Bay of Pigs Invasion, and Cuban Missile Crisis.
In this new quarter we'll learn more about the presidencies of JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan; we'll also learn about the Civil Rights Movement (and read A Raisin in the Sun), social activism in the U.S., the Vietnam War, and the Middle East and oil politics. We'll cover topics such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Singing Revolution in the Baltic states, Tiananmen Square, and the Iranian Revolution. We'll get as close to 2012 in history as time allows!
Throughout all of this, all 7th and 8th graders will continue working on their independent country research projects. The weekly research topics and assignments we've been working on since the end of Q2 will be put towards a 5 Paragraph Essay and an oral and visual presentation; both the essay and oral/visual presentation will be due at the very end of the quarter/school year.
Whew! That's a lot, but we'll do our best :)
Please don't forget that I post homework and due dates on my class Twitter account (@MsHoodsHoodlums).
Please always feel free to contact me with questions, concerns, and constructive feedback!
See you next week!
Thanks,
Ms. Hood
