Snapshot

Here's a short glance at what each of my classes is doing right now:

8th Grade: Salt dough maps of regions of Asia.

Challenges:
1. Food coloring is not available in Korean grocery stores. I begged green, yellow, and red food coloring off of the science teacher, but had no blue. Rivers and lakes will just have to be colored in.
2. Kids interpret "Work in pairs" time as "You can get away with speaking Korean" time. Points are coming off for this.
3. Salt dough doesn't have to be messy, but if eighth grade boys have any say in it, it will be. Interestingly enough, the boys are much more squeamish than the girls about getting dirty and mixing gooey squishy dough. This means they sort of whack at it and splash bits everywhere. Then, once they go to their desks, the girls take the dough and shape it into maps, and the boys make doughballs and fiddle with them, tearing them up and sticking them back together.

I wrote this sentence discussing my plight, but it came out sounding like a bad emo poem. So I reformatted it and offer it here:

Excessively enthusiastic pummeling
and thwacking of dough
scattered tiny little
dough-drops
into the wood grains of my floors.

Successes:
1. I debated whether or not to pre-make the dough, but I finally decided to have the kids do it. I think kids more and more are living in a ready-made world, where you buy clay and Play-dough pre-made and pre-colored. They all found the concept of mixing salt, flour, water, and dye to do it yourself quite amusing (if sometimes gross; see above).
2. The maps look awesome. I will try for pictures.

7th Grade: Trade and Trading Empires of the Middle Ages

Challenges:
1. A mishmash unit - we had to skip around the book a lot and talk about everything from the Mongols to the African Gold Kingdoms to the Byzantine Empire to the Vikings. Hard to keep it organized.
2. I don't actually care about the African Gold Kingdoms. This probably makes me a bad person. Sorry.

Successes:
Unit project, "A Medieval Merchant Job Fair." I had the students write a sales pitch and make a poster for their region (Byzantines, China, Arabs, Vikings, Hanseatic League, and Venetians) and then we voted on which group we'd like to trade for. I would have picked Venice, which got absolutely zero votes. Our landslide winner - the Hanseatic League. Go figure.

Bonus success: When my mother shared this story with my grandfather, he immediately said, without knowing the outcome, "They should pick the Hanseatic League." He may be 94 and almost 7,000 miles away, but he knows them better than I do.

Sixth Grade: Greek Gods and Goddesses

Challenges:
1. Explaining to kids, "Well, yes, Zeus is married to Hera, and Apollo is Zeus's son, but he's not actually Hera's son..."
2. Then trying to decide whether or not to mark "Zeus married many women" wrong on a quiz.
3. Trying to get the kids to say "Underworld" instead of "hell" because they're just so pumped to be able to say "hell" in school.

Successes:
Really cute posters of the symbols of various gods and goddesses that look very nice on my wall. Also, feeling like I've helped Justin out by getting the kids prepped and pumped for next week's Myths unit in his English class.

Fifth Grade: Significant moments in the Revolution (Trenton, Valley Forge, Saratoga)

Challenges:
1. Not laughing every time I say things like, "Nathan Hale spied for the Patriots," because I always want to add, "before Super Bowl XXXVIII."

Successes:
My Hessian ancestor, who fought for the British in the colonies before deserting to become a farmer in Pennsylvania, has attained cult status with the fifth grade. They are all very proud of him for ending up on the "right" side - I still get a kick out of how thoroughly these Korean kids have adopted the Patriots in this war. They all feel personally betrayed by Benedict Arnold. They were very disappointed to hear that he lived out his life in Britain and died of old age.