Monday, December 8th

Today students took an RI7 snapshot on Edmodo.  Standard RI7 is focuses on being able to research and find answers quickly in informational texts.  I'll use the results to make my reading groups for the Spanish-American war activity tomorrow.  We then went over this week's vocabulary list and reading response homework.

In order to understand the role innovations and migrations have played in our world, I felt that it was necessary for students to have a basic knowledge of imperialism.  Students analyzed several political cartoons and created a thought map about the reasons/justifications for imperialist actions at the turn of the last century.  This is not an easy topic to discuss; however, I believe that students benefit when they understand underlying motivations.

Then we read Messenger.  Today we focused on identifying the differences in setting.  Students thought about the theme, Control vs. Choice, and related it back to people's relationship with food in each of the three books.

We concluded our day by working on our projects.  Our celebration of learning will take place on Thursday, December 18th, 10:30am-11:30am.  We will have light refreshments and parents will be able to see all of the hard work that students have been doing.