Things 7 and 8 combined

Right now I am in the middle of History Day with my students. I seem to mention this in EVERY blog, so I think you can see how all-consuming it can be. So, I did some initial browsing of the RPC and Dribbling lessons to see what I could include to make HD an even bigger success without creating more work for my students or myself.

After examing the 5 steps, it seems as if between info from national history day, minnesota history day, my own teaching bag of tricks, and collaboration with my gifted and talented teacher and LMS, I have the first 4 steps firmly covered for history day. I am lacking in the area of evaluation. It seems like both the students and I are so relieved when it is over that I just ignore the final step. But I found a couple of tools that I am going to try out. There was a "student self-assessment rubric for research module" that I am going to have the kids hand in at the end of January with their 5 paragraph research paper. This should give them direction on what they need to work on for the Feb 19th due date. I also found a series of sentence starters that I want to use for reflection at the very end.

This may appear to be a very superficial use of these tools, but I am going to get my feet wet with history day. When that chaos is over, I may try the tools again with the unit that I do at the end of the year on the Medieval period. Time to collaborate with my LMS! Yahoo!