ANCIENT CIV / AK STUDIES 4TH HOUR

Class Introduction:

My Ancient Civilizations class and Alaska Studies class is designed to be a survey class. Meaning there is no way we are going to hit all of the cool stuff in Alaska over the last 10,000 years, nor will we be able to cover every inch of the first 7000 years of ancient civilization. Ancient Civ will start from the dawn of time until Ancient Greece 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.

We finish up Ancient Civilization in December and will be starting Alaska Studies in January.

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 their mistakes and that they are willing to learn from them.

I do a lot of group projects. Most of these will all be done in class, however I will be assigning one next week that will need support from home by visiting a local attraction. More information will be given next week�

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 writing assignments will be on Google Docs and can be 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 these yet, but I will always send things home with your student about upcoming projects and power points.