The 7th graders are deep in their research of what early humans’ life was like.  Early humans were hunter-gatherers and they used hafted stone tools like ones pictured at right.  Students have gathered information from five sources on Khan Academy and will continue to use the writing process to organize the information into categories or […]

The 8th graders are now fully immersed in our study of the American Revolution using the musical ‘Hamilton.’  They seemed hooked since day 1 when we began with, appropriately, the first song, called ‘Alexander Hamilton.’  You can listen to it here.  We have now met all of the major characters from Act I and are […]

In our last unit, 7th Graders practiced (and practiced and practiced) very important paragraph writing skills.  They did this in paragraph skills centers, through independent paragraph work, and by collaborating for the pre-writing and/or writing (drafting) steps of the writing process to write a paragraph with peers. The topics for these collaborative paragraphs were: What […]

Students took our last unit-about authoritarian government in The Hunger Games and in real life-very seriously.  A major aspect of the unit was a group project.  Students were broken into groups of 4-6.  Each group was assigned a different real-world authoritarian government to research, learn, and present to the class.  Each group also planned and […]

The Hunger Games Unit I love this unit.  It is definitely one of my favorites.  I created this unit because I found that it was hard for most of my students to understand the rights they have in the United States, why those rights are important, and their responsibilities as citizens.  It was only by […]

Snow day tomorrow! And less than three weeks until December break!  This year is going by so fast.  The next three weeks are going to center around two things:  1. very clear instruction about writing an academic paragraph and 2. early human migration and its effects on humanity. The Human Family Tree We are watching […]