September Highlights

There is so much happening in our classroom this month!

US History students are learning about the work of historians through the Stanford History Education Group's "Thinking Like a Historian" series. This program is serving to add to our academic language in the classroom this year. We are also studying the pre-Revolution and the Revolutionary War. Our study centers around "March Madness"-style brackets. 

Student groups are analyzing people, places, ideas, and events of the time period through seeding and regional tournaments. The ranking necessary to complete these regionals isn't easy! Students develop their rankings and topics independently, then they need to prove to their group mates the importance between, for example, a three seed versus a six seed. The elimination rounds are full of animated voices and students scrambling to locate factual justifications in our materials and create an agreed-upon set of topics and a winner. The first two regionals are complete, we are now taking more time to learn about the war and will interpret excerpts from "Common Sense" and create a blackout poem with part of the Declaration of Independence--watch this space!

My Language Support-History class is so rewarding! These students are so eager to learn. We are studying maps and one of our highlights was going outside all hour last week to traverse the school property with a GPS unit, determining latitude and longitude coordinates around the campus. How fun!

I am amazed at how different teaching this class is compared to my US History class. It's not just different materials and all three Middle School grade levels at once, it's the nature of the class. The students are keeping me on my pedagogical toes and I really need to plan and structure with best practices in mind. Language Support students have little to no prior knowledge in our common language. I even got to practice my German today--not conversationally, but while teaching and re-teaching the concept of a map key. I need practice but, all in all, it went pretty well.

Onward!




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