WORLD HISTORY 3RD HOUR

Class Introduction:

My World History class is designed to be a survey class. Meaning there is no way we are going to hit all of the cool stuff in the world over the last 10,000 years, so we are going to get a good sampling of some of the cool parts� The objectives of this class are to use these cool points in history to develop reading and writing skills, critical and analytical thinking processes, cooperation and team work, increase vocabulary, and apply all of this to our every day lives.

COURSE WORK
There will be daily bell ringer work to develop language and writing skills. These are called Daily Language Review and will consist of 5 questions every day; 2 questions will always be editing grammar/spelling/punctuation and the other three will be a variety of English skills. We go over the answers in class and the objective is to make and correct mistakes, not just copy down the answers at the end. Bottom line, I want to see mistakes and be willing to learn from them.

Vocabulary will be given with most units. I teach this in a variety of ways but have found that if we break up the list as a class and draw pictures for the words and play a game with them, students remember them really well. I offer both a pre and post test and take the grade of the post test for Zangle.

I do a lot of group projects. From building a pyramid in ancient Egypt to painting our own renaissance masterpiece and using a printing press to mass produce a document, I try to get as hands on as we can. This will all be done in class.

I have tried in the past to assign homework to practice �school skills,� but found that it was largely ineffective and I was just assigning busy work. I have decided this year not to do that. We have enough going on and my adding one more piece of paper to lose wasn�t helping. So instead, just ask your student about what we are doing in history. Ask questions like �what was your favorite part about history today.� Or �How many times did Ms. Smith lose her dry erase marker today?� and you are bound to get a conversation at the dinner table going.
That being said we will be writing in here. All of our assignments will be on Google Docs and easily accessed anywhere your student has an Internet connection. Some of our students need extra time on this and will need time outside of class to work on this. I don�t have exact dates nailed down for this yet, but it�s usually not until the end of the first semester and then 2 more times second semester.