Teaching Artifacts

During my takeover students participated in a Model United Nations project alongside some of the High Tech High North County students. During this project, students learned valuable research and debating skills, while also taking a brief look into the American Revolution and the effects it had on the French Revolution. Students partaking in this project were tasked with two final products, a position paper (which can be accessed by clicking the document to the left) and participating in their respective conferences. Students were able to select into either a committee on overpopulation, the fall of the USSR, or a committee based in the world of the show Stranger Things. These committees were designed and ran by our high school volunteers and provided several different points of entry for the ranging interests in the classroom. 

In this clip you will see me going over academic language required to speak on the American Revolution. This clip comes from part of the lesson sequence I did for my calTPA cycle 2, during my takeover. This was a lead up to learning about some of the events of the American Revolution, which was a good fit during the Model United Nations project as served as an example of how a government could mistreat its citizens and the outcomes of that.

As part of my takeover, I was tasked with beginning to prepare my 8th grade students with the upcoming state test. To do so, we began by learning about what an inference is and how to make an inference. Students first began their journeys into inferences through images before making the leap to text. Once we moved on to inferring in reading, we used the short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury. With this text students had to make several inferences at various points throughout the story. Once we completed the story students were tasked with creating a short story that would lead into, or connect, to "There Will Come Soft Rains." The goal here was to have students work on their narrative writing skills.