Week 6 in Mr. Bruce's History

Parents and Students (I'll start including all student addresses to this list, too),

Happy Homecoming! The events and dress-up days of this week have certainly played a big role in making an exciting homecoming week. I hope we all bundle up tonight as we cheer on the ORIOLES!

We have spent a significant amount of time this week developing big questions that we can use to give us purpose to study the past. The unit we began last week is titled (for my purposes) the "Nature and Consequences of the American Revolution." While it is perfectly reasonable for me to create a list of questions that we could use to guide us through this content study, it is essential to "thinking like a historian" that students develop their own compelling questions that they can pursue as we tackle this unit. Here is a the document with all our questions, by hour. Clearly we have much work to do...

It's a perfect way to give us a reason to study the past. What we have done is identify what is called a "compelling" question. This term comes from the C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards - I'll explain more about that next week. A compelling question is one that needs to be answered - it draws us in. These have no easy answer. However, if we break it down into smaller, easier "supporting" questions that we can answer, we are able to build an argument that starts to satisfy our bigger question. Ask your student to share their compelling question with you and talk with them about some smaller supporting questions that need to be answered before we tackle the big one.

I'll save you the long read today. After all it is homecoming weekend. For now, I invite you to take some time to introduce yourself to the class website: mrbruceshistory.wikispaces.com. This has been the home to my class online for seven years or so and has undergone three major overhauls. Anything I need to publish goes there. Students will later use this site to publish their own material and create pages and projects within here to display their work as we communicate what we have learned about the past with the world.

That's all for this week! Obviously, we're headed somewhere now. ;)

Yours,
Mr. Bruce