Hello 7th graders and Parents!
So, here’s the plans for the week.
Monday – We continued on Chapter 4 with the story of Cabeza de Vaca. It’s an awesome story! Expedition to a strange land! Bloody strife! Ships going down in an epic storm, their masts crashing into the sea and sailors desperately try to avoid a watery grave! Secret plans and midnight escapes! What’s not to like? I’ll hand out the second Guided Reading for the chapter (GR4-2) and if we have some time the students can work on it. It’ll be due Thursday!
Tuesday – We’re going to have our first Socratic Seminar on Tuesday. Hernando Cortez…hero or villain? It should be a good talk!
Wednesday – All right then, so on Wednesday we’ll discuss the ill-fated journey of Fray Marcos! A small band of explorers, out to determine the truth of the wild stories about the lands north of New Spain. They do report what they found. Truthful, though? Not so much. I’ll assign a 5-paragraph paper in which I basically want the students to address the prompt discussed in the Socratic Seminar. Was Cortez a Good Guy? Bad Guy? Some of both? The students will tell me what they thing (and why!) in the paper. It’ll be due next Tuesday.
Thursday – Today we’re going to talk about Francisco Coronado! Boy, talk about ill-fated journeys. It turns out New Mexico history is rife with ill-fated journeys. Road trips in the 1500s were just a bad idea, in New Mexico. Remember, GR4-2 is due today!
Friday – The Columbian Exchange! The meeting of the Old World and the New World changed the world in a fundamental way. More so than probably anything since the last Ice Age ended. We’ll talk about it. There will be a little work to do in class after we cover it. Also, hopefully, I’ll have the use of my handy-dandy, always-working, never-failing SmartBoard to show a few things to the class! Sadly, isn’t working just right now. Perhaps “always-working, never-failing” is a tad optimistic. I have the highest hope for Friday, though!