The Week That Was in 505

This week our Road to Revolution unit was coming to a close. My focus this year is using more strategies to build literacy skills in social studies. I’ve been inspired by a Building Literacy Strategies in Social Studies and a podcast called, The Science Behind Reading. From these items, I’m learning some new strategies with vocabulary, building background knowledge, explaining text structures, and exposing students to more informational texts and reading.

Monday

Monday, was uneventful. I had students finish their empathy maps from Friday. However, I wanted to a Gimkit as a review before the went back to empathy maps. I was hoping the Gimkit questions would refresh their memories. Gimkit is one of my favorite platforms and they have a new Jeopardy mode! I love that students can earn money and they can bet their money with a final question. It was awesome and engaging!

The empathy maps had students comparing British and Colonial perspectives during the American Revolution. These maps led to great discussions among students and served as a great review. (I wish I could share this, but it’s a file located at www.emc2learning.com).

Tuesday

Tuesday was the final question of our unit, “What attempts were made to avoid war?” With this question we looked at from a British perspective and a Colonial perspective.

With the British perspective I created a Peardeck Lesson where we looked at the repeal of the Stamp Act. We used this as an opportunity to practice sourcing, contextualizing, close reading, and corroborating. I asked some basic questions:

1. Who wrote this document?
2. What motivated the author to write this document?
3. Whose voice or opinion is missing?
4. What information is left out?

These simple questions led to a great discussion and we dove a bit deeper and learned that the same day British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, they passed the Declaratory Act which gave them total authority over the colonies.

Immediately following this, I tried out a literacy strategy which I oddly paired with 8*pARTS template (click here). This lesson was on Olive Branch Petition and showed how the colonists attempted peace. I created an 8*pARTS template with these headings around it:

1. Rephrase the article title as a question.
2. Who?
3. When?
4. Why?
5. What?
6. 3 word summary.

Here is the structure of the lesson I ran:

1. I had students partner up.
2. Student 1 read to Student 2, as Students 2 took notes.
3. Students 2 then read to Student 1 as Student 1 took notes.
4. Both students discussed notes.
5. Then students wrote a 5 sentence summary about the article.

This lesson worked out wonderfully and the 8th graders surprisingly didn’t mind reading to each other. I went great! As students were working, I was walking around offering feedback, asking questions, and grading. I quickly realized this format could easily be implemented with a Cyber Sandwich.

This 1 day lesson finished off our unit and we were now ready to tackle the final assessment and answer our question, “Was the American Revolution Avoidable?”

Wednesday and Thursday

Wednesday and Thursday would be used for our final assessment – the Netflix Assignment. I forget where I found this awesome Netflix template, but I love it because it’s easy to change and manipulate for assignments.

During the Netflix assignment students write a title and description of a show they create. They can change the show pictures as well. After students create a title and description, they break their show down into 4 episodes with descriptions.

Before students began creating, I reminded them of our unit questions and the main compelling question, “Was the American Revolution Avoidable?” I encouraged them write their show description in a way that answered our compelling question. Then I encouraged students to create 4 episodes based on anything we learned during the last 2 weeks. There creations were awesome:

The Netflix assignment is so engaging and I’m always impressed by students work. This assignment works well with any subject and everyone should try it out!

Friday

After 2 days of designing Netflix shows, I wanted to use Friday as a fun day to try something new. The site www.emc2learning.com had a new idea. We played the 12 Topic Stitch Up.

I listed out 12 topics/concepts on a slide. Students formed groups of 4-5 and they worked together to choose 1 concept and relate it to 4 other concepts on the list. If they successfully explain their connections, they were given access to the Operation game board to pull out the piece without making is buzz.

This was so engaging as students worked together and just had fun! I will definitely be using this idea again and again.