Off to the Races

Three weeks until the big Holiday break does not seem like enough time! Throw in the specter of a possible snow day or two, and all of the related Holiday obligations outside of school and it is really a busy time of year!

This past week saw us working on a simulation for the Abolitionist Society Convention and the $35 Dollar Bill project. The Abolitionist Society convention is a simulation. Each student researches a famous Abolitionist and portrays them in the meeting. The meeting uses parliamentary procedure (which our students are familiar with because of Model UN simulations freshmen year and the Model UN project some of them participate in). I love simulations like this and do them quite frequently. The idea started with a lesson I saw published in the journal Social Education which I receive because of my membership in the National Council for the Social Studies.

In Ethics class this week we had Attorney James Lawley visit as a guest speaker. He came to my U.S. history classes in October to discuss Constitutional Law. This week he discussed his work as a Death Row Lawyer in Alabama and led a discussion of the Death Penalty. It was very fascinating! He talked about recent Supreme Court opinions, attorney-client confidentiality, and what its like working with people who are on death row. The students were captivated!

(James Lawley speaking to my class about the Death Penalty)

Also this week we had a training about eBackpack. This is a great "Workflow" website and app for student iPads that makes it easy for students to submit work and for teachers to take those submissions, grade them, and send them back to students all without paper and without printing anything! This service is provided for free to all schools in the State and its connected to the State Technology Learning Initiative. The instructor was great, I really appreciated how she attempted to meet everyone's needs. I came way ready to use eBackpack in my classes!

Wednesday night was the annual Maine Council for the Social Studies Board meeting. We reviewed the evaluations from the annual conference in November and they were overwhelmingly positive. We also discussed not offering a conference next Fall because the National Council for the Social Studies Conference will be at the same time and right nearby in Boston. We did discuss ways to encourage folks in Maine to attend and other things we can do this Spring and next Spring to keep Social Studies on everyone's minds and build off the great conference we had this year. I am really looking forward to attending the National Conference in Boston next Fall. Ken Burns (famous documentary filmmaker) is the keynote speaker!

(Ken Burns)

Lastly this week I attended a webinar training to prepare for my last webinar at the end of January. The webinar focus is around bringing Common Core and Literacy across the disciplines. We are using the book The Core Six. Our next webinar will focus on the strategy of inductive learning. I can't wait to try it out with my students (though I have done things similar in the past anyway)!

Two weeks left and still a ton to do! YIKES!!!