The past few weeks have been very eventful in Team 8-1 American History! Once again, I apologize for not updating the American History Blog until now. If you continue reading, you will see that the students and myself have been very busy with a Document Based Question (DBQ) response, completing the American Revolution Unit, and investigating the Articles of Confederation. Instead of doing a day-by-day breakdown of the events in American History, I figured I would write a short narrative of the happenings in Team 8-1 American History. I am going to begin with a major shout-out to all of my American History students for doing an excellent job with their DBQ responses! Students were provided several documents pertaining to Valley Forge and began to perform document analysis on each of the documents. The documents included diary entries, pamphlets, data-charts, and images on Valley Forge. Students utilized the documents to answer a DBQ prompt pertaining to reasons why a Patriot soldier would stay or quit the fight for freedom at Valley Forge. Students completed an outline, rough draft, and peer-edited their responses. Finally, students used the Hanx Writer, Word Smith, or Notes App to complete their final DBQ response. Although it took several days to grade each DBQ response, it was definitely worth it! The students showed so much progress and improvement from their first DBQ response! Well done everyone! Following the DBQ response, I created a presentation on Near Pod on Benedict Arnold. Several students had asked questions about Benedict Arnold, and therefore I felt that it was appropriate to spend a class period discussing Benedict Arnold’s legacy. Students were presented with information on Benedict Arnold’s treachery and then used the Near Pod App to debate his legacy. I found it interesting that a large amount of students thought that Benedict Arnold’s legacy could be defined as “complicated”. You can check on the presentation using this link. Following the Benedict Arnold presentation, I used a resource from George Washington’s Mount Vernon to introduce the Battle of Yorktown. Mount Vernon created a fantastic video series titled, Now or Never. I uploaded the Now or Never videos to the Ed Puzzle App, which allowed me to pose questions to the students and include other facts and anecdotes about the Yorktown Campaign. I highly recommend watching the Now or Never video series! Following the Now or Never lessons, students went on a Gallery Walk to investigate the Treaty of Paris 1783, the Northwest Territory, Northwest Ordinance, and Articles of Confederation. Students moved from station to station, performing different tasks and using different apps (Edmodo, Google Earth, etc.) to explore these different topics. You can view the Wikispace website I created for a portion of the gallery walk here! In addition, I created an iBook on the Articles of Confederation for students to use. The Articles of Confederation iBook contains videos, interactive images, assessment questions, and a 3D model to help students comprehend the Confederation Government. Students completed an eBackpack assessment as they navigated through the iBook. Students completed their exploration of the Articles of Confederation with a quiz on what they learned. To prepare for the quiz, I used the Quizziz platform to review vocabulary terms and the Socrative App to propose open-ended questions to the students. One final event that took place was a cultural exchange with students from India. Twenty students (ten from 7th grade & ten from 8th grade), participated in a Skype Session with students and teachers from the Birla School in India. Both sets of students were able to ask and answer questions about different aspects of culture. In addition, students were able to share popular dance forms from their country. The Skype Session was awesome! It was very interesting to learn so much about the culture of India! Shout out to Noah, Sam, Anna, McKenna, and Eva for representing Team 8-1 in this cultural exchange.
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Mr. Steve Hartnett
Mr. Hartnett will update the Room 212 Blog with classroom updates on a regular basis. Be sure to follow me on Twitter @ MrHartnett212 Archives
July 2019
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