Seems like a good day to write, it's incredibly gray and rainy here and little girl has a slight fever and cough, so it's been a fun day so far. We've been fortunate that this is the first real illness and we shudder to think how our son is going to handle it if he gets sick as he's much louder and more dramatic about things. Could make what was going to be an action-packed week even longer.
Our grading period and 6 weeks ends on Thursday and both 7th and 8th grade classes are finishing projects, have to prepare for their unit tests and I have to administer our school's common formative assessments (just a retake thankfully for 7th grade). The projects have been a mixed bag. I think the 8th graders have really enjoyed the Zombie Apocalypse geography project. Here's a link to the project, any and all comments or feedback on it are greatly appreciated https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xwKHEfE7bZRG-F5jheywkW7f1vY37NRK-AymZg552gU/edit#slide=id.p But I've had a lot of students make the connection to choosing locations based on geographic reasons rather than "hey I like Florida so I'm going to Florida." The kids have enjoyed using the scribble maps to track the spread of the zombie virus as well as show their migration route across the country. It's also eye-opening that as I'm introducing this project, how many of my students ask me "is this real?" Their fears were finally put to ease when I asked if they really thought I could break this news before twitter or the national media could. The students are in the final phase where they are writing about how they chose their location, what the geography of their location is like and what are the similarities and differences between their treks and those by the original settlers. I'm excited to see what connections have been made, from tracking the students so far, I've seen very few if any students that don't have a majority of their projects ready to turn in.
My 7th grade empire project has been a mixed bag, It's really hard to gauge because my 7th graders are all over the place. Some are high flyers, some are seat-warmers and the majority float between the two depending on the day and their mood. I've learned the hard way that they need as much structure as possible. I hope as the year goes on I can loosen the reigns but they really seem to be able handle the old-school approach of notes and lectures or articles and questions to answer. I definitely will need to restructure some things for 2nd semester and find more activities that keep them busy, jigsaws and controlled movement, stuff like that.
We'll see how these projects end up and how the week goes. Baby girl is sleeping, so I'm going to take her cue. Go Liverpool and Go Niners!
Thanks for reading
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