Thursday, September 6, 2018

The American Dream, Day 3 - Class Recap


A poster from some of my work before coming back to teach at Westview, helping 9th graders make the transition to high school.

Dear class,

It was a short week, as we continued thinking about the American Dream and creating work that might reflect it. Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets Addressed: 
Behavior LT 3: I can communicate and work effectively within a team or group.
Communication LT 1: I can communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing.

Soundtrack: "American Teen" by Khalid. Selected for today because it came up as an example of a related song to the American Dream in one of my classes on Tuesday. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 9/6/18:
News Brief/Blog Recap - Bailey
Slogans
Dream Posters
Work Time

Homework: Read the blog. The American Dream poster assignment is due at the start of next class! The next news brief is assigned to: Jordan.

News Brief/Blog Recap: Today's news brief was brought in by Bailey, who selected an article about this story: IdahoStateJournal.com - Family tradition wins Pocatello man $200,000 at the fair. We discussed this story for a bit (as well as how the lottery works) and then moved on.

We also checked in about the weekend and if anyone was up to anything interesting or fun outside of class.

Jackson was selected to do the next news brief.

As part of the news brief, we also watched the one minute BBC World News update. Here's the link to see the latest one minute update, at any time of day (it will probably be different from what we watched in class):


This brought up this story from yesterday, which we talked a bit about in class: NYTimes.com - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. "Lodestar" is a word that many people are questioning the origin of!

I also showed this website and the blog post from last class, so students could see the level of detail with each post.

Slogans: Last class, we ended by discussing what slogans for advertising the American Dream. Students were asked to come up with one as homework, and we shared a few in class. Here are some more examples (no, you cannot use any of these for your poster):


Hopefully these help a little in terms of thinking about slogans, if you had a difficult time with this.

Dream Poster: The main assignment for this introduction to the American Dream unit is creating a poster with your slogan/catchphrase, along with images, captions, and an explanation on the back. The full poster assignment is here:


We went through this carefully in class - my hope is that this is something fun and interesting for you to do, and that we can use the end products in creating a more colorful classroom for the rest of the year.

Work Time: The rest of class was devoted to work time on the American Dream posters, which will be due next class for grading. Please let me know if you have any questions! See you on Monday!

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