FCAT Fun Day

A few photos from FCAT Fun day:

(See if you can spot Watson in almost EVERY photo!)

Jessica and Eva 

(Jessica dropped her pickle soon after this--whoops!)

The boys from first period (and some extras)

McKendzie being a good sport with Watson, Cameron, and AJ. We all found out later how good of a dancer Cameron is :)

Mr. Pendergast and Trent preparing to be photographed.

Maybe they should have taken longer to prepare...

A lovely look at first period. 

That's it :)

Aborigines in Australia

Aborigines 

Last week the students in World Cultures explored Aborigines in Australia--what their lives were like before the British arrived and immediately after the British arrived--as a way to prepare to answer one of this week's essential questions: How are the Aborigines working to improve the lives of their people?

We watched the opening clips of the movie Rabbit Proof Fence, a movie that tells the true story of three Aborigine girls taken from their families and moved to an Aborigine settlement camp 1200 miles from their homes. The opening scenes were pretty emotional, and (like always) I was very proud that the majority of the students showed true compassion for the situation on the screen.

After watching the clips, and without much explanation from me, I asked the students to brainstorm answers to a few open-ended questions. Their responses were so interesting! 

Here are a few examples from all class periods...

Question: Why do you think a white man in a city gets to be the legal guardian of girls who live with their female relatives in the wilderness? 

 "He's rich and he wants to change the population."

Ubaldo: "He thinks he is powerful and racist."

Molea: "Because he's richer."

Muler: "He wants to tell them what to do, to marry white people."

Beatrice: "To use them for their own use."

Jay: "Because it's the law and he wants people to be white."

Question: If you had to compare what is happening in the video to something else in history, what would you compare it to?

Jay: "WWII, because of concentration camps."

Jimmy: "I compare it to slavery."

Sharay: "Hitler."

The students pushed their thinking further in class discussion, where they supported their answers and told me why they thought what they did. It's important to think about why someone has power just because they have money, and it's important to support why we compare two different historical events. The students knew that and explained their reasoning well. 

After I explained a bit more of the movie and after the class read a passage about Aborigines, the students had the knowledge they needed about the Aborigine past to understand why the Aborigines have worked so hard to rebuild their lives since. 

Tomorrow the students will finish up learning how the Aborigines are working to improve their lives, and we'll officially wrap up Australia and New Zealand early next week after FCAT Fun Day on Monday. 

We've learned so many other things this unit that I haven't posted on the blog, and if any parents are reading I hope you'll ask your student what else they've learned! 

**Note to students: The vocabulary quiz has been rescheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday due to my absence. 

And here are some completed vocabulary posters as promised:

Vocabulary Projects

Australia and New Zealand Vocabulary 

Friday and Monday we reviewed the vocabulary terms for the Australia and New Zealand unit. Most of the vocabulary terms really hit at the main concepts of the unit, so I thought the students would benefit from a day of review. 

To review the terms, the students worked with a partner to define three to five vocabulary words, draw a picture that helped them remember the word, and--most importantly--explain why that word is significant to learning about Australia and New Zealand.

Here are some of the projects from 4th, 8th, and 1st periods:

Nicolas and Sean show off:

Agustin and Muler hard at work:

Julio focused on his poster:

Anna and Molea working well together:

More finished projects will be posted tomorrow! 

And remember--vocabulary quiz Thursday and Friday!

Finally Done with FCAT!

Back to Australia!

After a week of FCAT testing, World Cultures finally got back to work! As a review on Monday, the students represented what we learned about the climate, geography, and animals of Australia and New Zealand in a drawing. The kiwi bird seemed to be the star of most drawings (check out Jose's kiwi below!)


Here are some great examples from the boys in 1st period:

   

 Vanessa and Jose show off their drawings during 4th period:

Vocabulary

We also added 8 more vocabulary words to our word wall on Monday. On Thursday and Friday all classes will receive a vocabulary practice for homework, and our vocabulary quiz will be Thursday, May 3 (for 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th periods) and Friday, May 4 (for 4th and 8th periods).

In the meantime, here are the 16 vocabulary words we've learned so far:

1. marsupial: an animal, such as a kangaroo, that carries its young in a body patch

2. tectonic plate: a huge slab of rock that moves slowly over a softer layer beneath the surface of Earth's crust 

3. geyser: a hot spring that shoots a jet of water and steam into the air

4. fiord: a long, narrow inlet or arm of the sea bordered by steep slopes created by glaciers

5. unique: one of a kind, different

6. isolate: to keep separate

7. ample: more than enough, abundant

8. major: greater in size or importance

9. impress: to have a strong effect, to amaze

10. adapt: to adjust, change, or alter

11. possession: ownership

12. rapidly: marked by a fast rate of activity, quickly

13. Maori: a native of New Zealand whose ancestors first traveled from Asia to Polynesia and later to New Zealand

14. Aborigine: a member of the earliest people of Australia who probably came from Asia

15. penal colony: a place where people convicted of crimes are sent

16. station: in Australia, a large ranch for raising livestock

Happy studying :)

More on the Aborigines and the Maori people in the next post...

Australia! 

Last Thursday we started our unit on Australia and New Zealand. The students seemed pretty excited to move on to a continent of kangaroos, wombats, and dingos. Australia and New Zealand are so different from the rest of the world, so it's no surprise our unit essential question would focus on why the region is so different. 

Our unit essential question:

I usually begin a unit using a KWL Chart, which is a chart that asks students what they already know about a subject, what they want to learn about a subject, and, at the end of the unit, what they learned about the subject. Often I ask the class to raise their hands and provide answers, but I thought letting the students work on their own KWLs would be fun. The students worked in groups to fill in a "Know" and "Want to know" column. 

A blank chart:

I played music (Michael Jackson, anyone?), and when the music stopped each group stood up from their desks and moved to the next group. There they decided on the best response in that group's K or W column and they recorded it on their "master" copy. By the end, everyone in the class had read everyone else's chart and had a great time doing it. 

Here is an excellent KWL chart from a group in 4th period:

After the KWLS, we moved on to the animals, climate, and geography of Australia. I think the students especially liked the dingos. More on that later! 

Welcome to our classroom blog!

Welcome to our classroom blog! 

I'm so excited to start sharing the work the 6th grade students are doing in our World Cultures class. I'll be posting the best work of the week here, as well as homework assignments, weekly vocabulary lists, quiz dates, and unit/lesson essential questions. 

For the first post, I'll start by giving you an update of where we've been and provide some photos of the fantastic work the students have done so far this year! 

Southeast Asia

Before the FCAT began this week we wrapped up a unit on Southeast Asia, my favorite unit so far. I think the students really enjoyed it as well! We learned about the climate, culture, and history of this diverse region of islands and peninsulas. 

My students learned about the Vietnam War through videos, photographs, and various texts. We watched clips from the television show "The Wonder Years," the documentary Dear America, Letters from Vietnam, and clips from the movie Across the Universe. We used cause and effect and sequencing to understand this important event. 

7th Period's "Before, During, and After" Drawings:

We also watched portions of a documentary Scream Bloody Murder to learn about the Cambodian genocide in the mid-1970s by the Khmer Rouge. The students created posters to hang on the door in the style of "Kony 2012" posters; instead of Kony, though, we focused on Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge. 

My 4th period class did a great job brainstorming and creating posters:

At the end of the unit, students compared and contrasted the countries of Southeast Asia and then chose one country they would visit. Then they created a travel brochure about that country to try to convince ME to visit! 

Alani's travel brochure stood out from the crowd--she did a fantastic job!

Thanks for reading!

Next Post: Australia!