I can't believe it's February already! January was obviously a blur of snow, ice and discontinuity. In Ancient, we finally finished our Mesopotamia projects (designing a city and designing an alphabet). Those project encouraged the students to think like Ancient people and come up with new ideas and I was very impressed with what student's came up with on both projects.
We have moved on to China this week. We are sticking pretty close to the textbook, but we are continuing to develop our non-fiction reading strategies as we go. This has stimulated some great discussions in class on the Mandate of Heaven, predicting the future, and surprisingly the songs of Lin-Manuel Miranda (it was tangential but it made a connection for some I hope!) We will continue China into next week going as far as the Han Dynasty. More of the same, reading strategies and discussion followed by comprehension quizzes.
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We are back! It has been a crazy last couple of weeks of school. With snow days and two hour delays it's been hard to keep a routine and structure within the classroom. My daughter was also sick before break so that made it seem even more scrambled up to me.
We have spent the past two days in Anceint having a Geography Bee. The winners were decided today and everyone did a great job. The classroom winners will compete in the school competition Thursday next week. Becuase of the Geography Bee, the Mesopotamian city posters are coming along slowly. The students had good chuncks of time before break and I am giving them today and Monday to finish up in order to be ready to present on Tuesday. After that we will be designing our own writing system, just like the mesopotamians did which will conclude our unit. We will do a quick tour of China and then move on to India which will help us transition into world religions. I hope everyone had a great break and is ready for a great new year of Ancient History! I can't seem to find a rhythm with updating this blog this year, and the conference schedule and now winter weather seem to be new excues, but I will continue to try to find time in the week to send out updates.
We have completed our pliminary fact finding and reading on the first cities and life in Ancient Mesopotamia. A period covering about 3500 years and several different empires and peoples. We have now moved on the to the project of taking our knoweldge and applying it designing our own Mesopotamian cities. The students will have their first full period today to work on it. We will probably shoot for presenting the posters on Friday. Next week we will take our test on Mesopotamia which will consist of designing an alphabet that is functional just like the Mesopotamians had to do when they invented writing and the Phoenicians did when they invented a simplified alphabet. That will wrap our study of Mesopotamia and then onto China briefly and then India which will help us transition into our study of religions. But that will have to be in January. Thank you! I hope everyone has a very happy break and enjoys time with family and fridnds to celebrate the holidays. We have had several assignments during this busy week. On Tuesday students did a Discovery Day assignment, Wednesday and Thursday the students were reading and writing haiku's about Roman Food and today we read and did a worksheet on Roman Medicine. The work sheet is due Monday and we will take a quiz over chapter's 3-4 of Gross Rome on Monday or Tuesday.
We are then going to read one more chapter about Roman Government changes before we take our assessment on Rome. Probably the week before Thanksgiving. I am looking forward to meeting some parents and families at conferences here in a couple of weeks. As we approach Friday and our last day of 1st quarter, I wanted to give a mid week update. There was no school last Friday so I didn't a blog post out but rest assured we are still here and plugging along.
We are reading and reading about Rome and also learning non-fiction reading strategies that will help with all of our reading for this class in the future. We have read two chapters of the Gross History of Rome and we are reading Ancient Rome. We will have a quiz over Ancient Rome chapters 4-5 on Thursday or Friday depending on how our review goes Thursday. After that we are going to to go back to the Gross History of Rome and finish that book. We will probably read one more chapter Ancient Rome together before we do our Rome test and move on! We are still probably two weeks out from the test. Make sure you are checking powerschool to see if there are any mistakes on your grades before they go out on quarter report card. I was out Friday to travel to a wedding so here is what is going on this week in class. We are starting our Ancient Rome reading and learning some great reading strategies for reading non-fiction. We will be reading some sections together and some the students will read on their own or with partners. We will do periodic comprehension quizzes to see if they are paying attention while reading and learning the strategies. We will probably have our Chapter 1 quiz on Thursday.
The students were also working on their Rome "All About a Civilization" work sheet, I would like those in by the end of the week. Most are done and if they finish their reading early they can finish those in class. We are also working on Rome maps after reading is finished. Our Mindfulness practice continues this week with counting as our anchor. We also talked about the Ogre of emotions and watch the introduction to Shrek to see that the things we fear are often not as big of a deal as we work our selves up to thinking. Since Mondays are becoming so busy and Friday afternoons I seem to have more time, I am going to try and start posting a look ahead on Fridays. We will see if I can be more consistent with that.
I am looking forward to meeting many parents on Tuesday night during open house. Also, with open house being late this year, I am hoping that more people will be reading this in the future! We are starting to dive into Roman history right now with the video: Rome: Engineering and Empire. This is a long one and I like to teach during the video so it's taking up most of the week. We should be finishing up Monday. Then we will move into Roman Geography and start reading one of our two Roman History books. We also took a test this week on 15 major events in ancient history. You can see the scores on Powerschool. Some students did great, others need to be studying this weekend so they can come see me at lunch and do a re-take by Monday or Tuesday. Please e-mail me or message me on Instagram (@fischerclass) if you have any questions. Have a great weekend! We are having a bit of a strange week this week. Our two amazing counselors: Mr. Schuldheisz and Mrs. Sievers are in my classroom today and tomorrow to do an Anti-Bullying workshop with the sixth graders. So that is chopping up the week for Ancient History a bit.
In Ancient, we are starting on our study of Rome this week. We are also continuing to work on our Ancient History Timeline which will be tested in one week on Tuesday the 27th. We started a video overview of Ancient Rome and there is a packet that goes with that. We will be working on that all week. Next week, after we take the Ancient Timeline Test, we will start studying World Geography. We will also be working on non-fiction reading strategies as we continue to study Ancient Rome. It has been a busy week of instruction and I haven't felt like I had time to breath let alone type a blog. Things are going well so far so many student's made excellent progress on their Earth's History Calendar. Those scores are in the gradebook now for a couple of classes and I am still working working on getting the other two classes entered. Parents and Students are reminded that you can re-take or make up any assignment you want to within a reasonable time frame. My focus is on you learning the concepts so if it takes a couple of extra days to get it then that's great!
We are going to finish up our Ancient History Timeline today and the test on that will likely be next Friday. You will be starting to see the pre-test in the gradebook but none of the students knew any of the dates so they all got 0's. Please remember that these pre-tests don't count towards their grade they are just a tool to show growth. I full expect that next week when the test counts they will have learned a lot of material. Also, today we are going to start doing Mindfulness of breath. This technique is a great anchor for students who are needing to create some space between their stimulus and their response. I am enjoying the new the Apple Watch app called Breath which is fantastic for this practice. Let me know if you have any questions. Week 2 is live! I am a day behind on my blog for the week because we have been so busy. I feel like I have been talking to the students for a week straight. So..... it's finally time for me to shut up and give some work! We are starting with a textbook scavenger hunt. Most of the classes just barely got going on that today so they will have a lot of time tomorrow and even Friday if needed to finish up.
You may have heard from your students that we are continuing to work on mindfulness. We did some more work in all of classes. We are practicing mindfulness of sounds. We will keep working on that through the week so I challenged them to try it home for a minute or so and see how the do. Parents you can try too! Just find a mindful posture (relaxed but alert) and listen to the sounds in the world around you without judgement) Nothing to it! We also talked about using mindfulness of sound to create SPACE between our stimulus and our reaction to it. So maybe one of you might catch yourself before you have a reaction that is harmful to others or to yourself. The first grades are entered and I am already hearing from some parents. Remember, Pre-tests don't count towards a final grade!!!!!!!!!! I put them in the gradebook so we all can see growth. So you will see those from time to time in the gradebook, don't be alarmed. Students should be failing the pre-test, it means they don't know the information. Which is good, it means I have something to teach them! I will give them a post-test soon to see if they learned anything. There are several students who have not shown their parents the class expectations, that is a 10 point assignment and I will still take those this week for full credit. Thanks for reading, let me know if you have questions in the comments or send me an e-mail. The Instagram has been fun so give me a follow if you can and feel free to leave a comment! |
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February 2017
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