4 Days In...Thematic Teaching

So we've taken the plunge.  The course is redone and so far, so good I think.  I guess I'll go through and explain the break down first before we get to week 1 here.

So after reaching out to some other teachers and bouncing some ideas off of them on this padlet and talking with one of my colleagues here at CHS, I put together these 6 units.

1. Historical Thinking Skills & the Modern Era
2. State-Building
3. Religion
4. Trade
5. Intellectuals
6. Conflict & War

I decided to take this broad approach with my themes, this way too some information will be brought up in multiple units too, to help students remember some of these things rather than we go over them for a few days early in the semester and we never think about Ancient civilizations until review time right before the test.
The thought process too was in some of these units, I can give the students more of a choice for what they wanted to learn about rather than have it all be mandated for them.  The goal with a lot of this do a lot of comparison work too as we'll be covering a lot of topics at once, and we can look for patterns, similarities and differences and analyze like that rather than just seemingly learning about all of these different people, places, and events and viewing them more in isolation.  The units aren't equal as far as time devoted to them either, so we can really stress the conflicts & wars before the exam, as well as key figures and movements in the Intellectuals unit which is also during 2nd semester.
It also allows me to bring back a couple of projects that I really enjoyed and hopefully will have success with.  My last year teaching middle school, we did tournament projects that I felt went really well, same with my after the AP exam project.  I haven't been able to fit it in really to a regular world class but now it'll be the backdrop to our Intellectuals unit.  I also get to bring some things I did in AP World and tweak them to now fit these classes like my Comparative Religions Project, and do some change and continuity over time things with my classes.  The goal certainly is to not see history as so static and to make things as relative as possible.
I know there will be holes and I'll miss some key things, but this first week has gone really well.  I think avoiding some of the early struggles like going back to starting with early civilizations has helped.  We've used current events to look at historical skills.  In just 4 days, we've looked at point of view, sourcing, corroboration, how things go viral using examples from just two months ago along with media bias.  We're already through terrorism, and the posters my students made have been really good.  And this was done with in less time than last semester had to complete there's.  We start globalization and human rights next week, but if I have 17 more weeks like this first one, it's going to be an outstanding semester.