You all know that I am thrilled to be making final preparations to our presentations for Saturday. We will miss those of you who can't make it. Some final reminders for Saturday: We will be meeting at 2 pm at Grapes & Gallery downtown. The Gallery is on Taylor Street between Assembly and Main (right behind Mast General Store). There is a parking garage that is free on Saturdays at the corner of Taylor and Assembly (across from the big post office on Assembly Street). Feel free to park in there. The presentation should only take about an hour.
Thanks for all your help in getting this project ready to publish! In class, we are moving on to learning more about social studies. Through that study, we will be engaging ourselves as readers, writers, and mathematicians as we uncover information about how and why the government acquired the states west of the Mississippi River, the lives of settlers as they moved their whole families at times to claim land, and how this affected people living on that land before the settlers got there.
To do this learning, we will be reading historical fiction books that share perspectives of many different groups of people who were a part of the westward movement before the Civil War. We will read about families who moved in covered wagons, abolitionists who were working to end slavery, boys and girls who were working hard out west to build a home and life for themselves and their families, and a girl whose family was forced from their homes during the Trail of Tears. We will discuss these books each week in small groups with one of our teachers (Ms. W or Mrs. Schumacher), considering topics like our emotional responses to the books or how characters are in conflict with one another. Then we bring our ideas back together to as a whole group to discuss how these books relate to our class big idea of "Expand," helping us better understand all the different facets of what the idea of expand means. We use all of these complicated pieces to help us truly understand the work of historians and the complexity behind historical events. Just like Mr. Hass' class taught us at gathering last week, historians have the immense responsibility of picking which events and people to feature and which to exclude. We will be understanding the different motives of people in the time period and the causes and conditions which supported the expansion of the US. We will negotiate the choices that people during this time made and consider if we might have made different ones.
We will then take these accounts of life during this time period, and use those to help us develop characters, and create our own historical fiction diaries. I can't wait to share these with you and the progress we are making on them!
UPDATE ON EXPERT PROJECTS:
I know that earlier in the year I shared with you the biography expert project that we were planning to do during the month of February. After meeting with Drew and taking on the movie making project, I decided it was best to consider our movie making venture one of our first expert projects, so that we could really devote all of our attention to our films. We will do a more traditional expert project after spring break. This will involve some work and research at home, but we will do most of the construction/creation of the project at school.
