Fehn's Place: Putting it all Together: _Across Five Aprils

Wow! My 8th graders have worked so diligently to put together their culminating projects for our Across Five Aprils and the Civil War unit. Rather than a unit test, they are demonstrating what they've learned through eight required learning "pieces."

These include:

1) a dialectical journal on one of the significant passages,

2) a poem imitating Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" in which the students are expected to show prominent images of the novel and the war,

3) a map of the Union and Confederate states along with paragraphs on the significance of three battles fought in both the novel and the war - bridging history and fiction,

4) a "Rank of Importance" in which the students determine the five most significant events in the life of the protagonist Jethro Creighton, and they defend those choices,

5) a mini research essay on a significant person, place, or event from the Civil War era,

6) an analysis of a piece of Civil War art, connecting art, literature, and history,

7) a choice piece of either "Twitter Tweets," a movie soundtrack playlist, or a photo/word collage, and

8) a Reflection of Learning in which the students reflect on what they learned, how they know they learned it, and how they might use this information in the future.

I have enjoyed the creative process with them, as they have worked to produce these pieces over the course of only three weeks. One of my goals was for their projects to be designed, created, and put together at school - without any outside help. I wanted these projects to genuinely reflect what my students have learned about literature and history. In order to do this, with limited class time, I have encouraged students to stay after school all week to use the computer lab and my classroom as a working place. The collaboration and camaraderie that I have seen as students encourage one another to do their best has been one of the highlights of my year! I am so excited to put these final projects on display at our annual Achievement Expo this Thursday, May 22nd!