Comic Strip!

Making a comic strip was pretty fun! And here is my comic!

September 28th, 2012

Today we were back into the same routine of daily history class type activities after our Quest that we had yesterday. The Quest wasn't as bad as i thought it was going to be, as the first text or quiz of a new teacher is always a learning curve. Back to buisness. The first thing that we did today was go over a worksheet on the New England colonies, Middle colonies, and the Southern colonies. This was homework the night before so we just had to correct the answers. Last night we also signed up for a voki.com account. We then wrote a little monologue about a person who lived in one of these colonies. We had to make it what the average colonist would be for that area. In my group we had Mr.John Jacobs who came from England and lived in the Southern colonies. He owned his own indigo and rice plantation and hoped to expand it to include tobacco. A few other things that we included was that he went to the Anglican chuch and he owned many slaves. We used this voki.com account to create our person and bring him to life. I liked how we got to connect to the colonists on a personal level and bring them to life, rather than just memorising facts about them.

Freedoms Ed-cafe

Today in history we did a class exercise called an ed-cafe. Thats when you are grouped together and assigned a topic, then in groups of other topics you lead an 8 minute conversation about your topic. You rotate your groups after every time so you are talking with other students in the class. This was the first time I ever did an ed-cafe and going into it I was a little unsure of what it would be like. After the fist conversation I really started to get into it and really enjoy talking about these freedoms that we have in the United States. I think that this was a really fun class and would definitely do it again! A couple things that I think could've been better was that the discussions got more involved, there were a lot of pauses inbetween all the points that were made but I think part of it was that we have never done this before. I think that the conversations that went really well were the ones in which the leader had prepared questions for the group before the point to get you really thinking about it before discussing it. Also I think that if people more of jumped in on the conversation instead of one person talking, then the next, and back and forth between two people, it would end up to be a better conversation. Or the leader get the people who didn't say anything to give some input because they might have a terrific idea but be too shy to actually put it out there. Overall I thought that this ed-cafe went really well and I'm looking forward to the next one!

My Constitution Timeline

Here is my timetoast.com timeline for the Constitution. Enjoy!

September 24th 2012

Again we find ourselves in the room of Mr.Boyle learning about United States history. Today we learned all about the Bill of Rights. To get a real understanding of these rights in a real-life, not really realistic scenerio created by Mr.Boyle himself. So, in a nutshell, the scenerio is about these party-goers that are having a blast at a Madonna concert on Mr. Roger Will's property on Sunday, which the Blue Laws prohibit. All of the characters get brought in, the party-goers got a bench trial and were sentenced with a day in the stocks, Roger Will got a trial jury and had to wait a few years for him to be sentenced to banishment and his farm sold off, and last but definitely not least, Madonna, who got a trial which ended up with her being hung. It was very saddening to hear that Madonna was killed in such a vicious way, but she had a nice career behind her. After we read this little scenerio we got to find the ammendments that the characters would have for appealing their convictions. A few of the most common ammendments that came up were the First Ammendment in which there is no law establishing a national religion, or the right of the people to peacefully assemble and the Sixth Ammendment which is that the people have a right to a speedy and public trial and have the assistance of a lawyer. Just to be clear what I have just stated aren't the ammendments in full, but the important pieces that go along with the scenerio. I found that learning the ammendments by having a fake scenerio really made me pay attention and enjoy learning them as opposed to  memorizing them off a sheet of paper. All in all today's class was surpisingly fun!

September 19th 2012

Yesterday in history we learned about the different branches of our govenment. We got some worksheets that taught us what jobs the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches have. ALso in these fabulously informational worksheets we learned how each of the branches keep the others in check, like if a bill gets a presidential veto, Congress can overpower it with a 2/3 vote in each house or the Courts can declare laws made in Congress unconstitutional. In the middle of this we had a lunch break, but soon enough we were back in class making little infographics. We had to make an infographic on the three branches, which you can see in my blog I posted yesterday. It was fun having to figure out ways to represent the jobs of the branches in little pictures as well as little facts blurbs. Today we ended with another crafty history assignment, but before I can get to that I will have to explain what we did in class a little bit. When we walked into class today, the first thing that happened was that we were handed two pieces of paper, in my case I got a sheet with information about federalists on it. Keirsten, Allie, and I then filled out a question sheet of the arguments for the approval of the Constitution. We then got paired up with a person of the opposite arguments, in my case an anti-federalist. We then swapped answers on our sheets to learn about the opposite sides ideas and arguments. Mr. Boyle then gave us a big sheet of paper to create a magazine cover for the side he gave us. The magazine cover we made was for anti-federalists and had 'articles' such as "Secret Drafting- What's really in the Constitution?" and "No Bill of Rights- No Freedoms." The past couple days in history have been fun, especially with all the little crafty things that we did.

Infograph

Here's the inforgraph that Kiersten, Allie, Jolene, and I made during class today...

Sorry for the inconvenience of the infograph being sideway. :)