Mrs. Lemke's Website

Welcome

Thanks for visiting the website for Mrs. Lemke's social studies and drama classes at Brandon Middle School. Parents and students should use this site to keep up to date with what's going on in my classes.

Please check Google classroom and Student Portal and discuss the information with your son/daughter.

Classroom Update

Please click on the links below to find out more about the curriculum and content for each class.

Social Studies: The seventh grade social studies curriculum focuses on ancient world history and geography with a deliberate focus on the content literacy. Students begin their exploration into world history with a focus on historical thinking. By unpacking historical and geographic thinking, students learn how these disciplines are distinct in how they ask questions and frame problems to organize and drive inquiry. Students learn that historians must have some evidence to support the claims they make in their accounts. They investigate how these social scientists select, analyze, and organize evidence, and then use that evidence to create accounts that answer questions or problems. By introducing students to the “invisible” tools that historians use to create historical accounts -- significance, social institutions, temporal frames (time), and spatial scales (space) – the course deepens students’ historical habits of mind and builds students’ social and content literacy. Students then investigate human history from the beginning until around 1500. They explore major and significant changes in each era through a chronological organization. Students learn about the earliest humans and explore early migration and settlement patterns. In studying the origins of farming and its impact upon emerging human cultures, students analyze evidence from the fields of archaeology and anthropology, and employ a wide range of data sources including artifacts, photographs, and geographic information. Students examine how the emergence of pastoral and agrarian societies set the stage for the development of powerful empires, trade networks, and the diffusion of people, resources, and ideas. The rise and fall of empires, as well as the nomadic groups in Afro-Eurasia, generated new zones of cultural and commercial exchange that linked regions across the world and enabled ideas to spread. The course concludes with the study of comparative world religions. These new belief systems had distinctive beliefs, texts, and rituals. Each shaped cultures by developing ethical practices and establishing codes within which diverse people were able to communicate and interact, often well beyond their local neighborhood. Through a comparative look at the major world religions, students compare them not only to each other, but to other belief systems that did not become “world religions.”

Drama: Students will be introduced to introductory drama skills, They will prepare and present 4 speeches and take part in several skits.