Monday March 9th
Today was my first day in Mr. Schmidt's eighth grade social studies class. Today was also state testing day for the school and the testing ended at 9:20a. After the students finished testing they went to their first hour class. In class the students did a quick review of what they did on their last test and then they were given a blank sheet of printer paper to write about what they learned in the last unit. Mr. Schmidt told the class to write everything that they knew about the Civil War and the events surrounding it that they were not tested on on the front and write any questions that they still have on the back. After about fifteen or twenty minutes he had the class come back together and talk about what they knew or still did not understand with the class then they turned in their papers for ten points.
Tuesday March 10th
Today was another state testing day so the schedule was shortened again so there was not as much time in class than usual. Mr. Schmidt used the time he had in class to introduce the next unit. The next unit is about the beginning of Reconstruction and is focusing on the main question "Does it matter who freed the slaves?" Mr. Schmidt used a clip from the movie Lincoln to help the students get a jump into the topic and get more interested in what they were going to learn about, but there was not much time to get a whole lesson done so he assignened them an article to read and take notes on to talk about on Wednesday.
Wednesday April 11
Today Mr. Schmidt introduced the leading question to the class and had them go through a group discussion of what they thought about it. The question was "does it matter who freed the slaves?" and the students talked about all of the different people who they thought had a hand in the emancipation of the slaves. Some of the main people the students brought up were Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, the Union and those involved in the Underground Railroad.
Then Mr. Schmidt had the students read an article about two different statues in honor of the Emancipation Proclamations. Then they went over it as a class and talked about how the statues were different and gave the credit of freeing the slaves to different groups. The class also talked about which statue was a better representation of what actually happened.