A Survey About You

Millennials are people born between about 1980 and 2000. This is your generation.

I want you to take a little survey about how you use media and your outlook on life.

Click on the link below to take the survey:

http://pewresearch.org/millennials/quiz/

When you are finished, go to your blog and tell me what you scored. Use complete sentences!

Sentence Frames for Theme

In this book, the main point is _______________.

One thing the author is trying to show us with this story is ____________________.

In today's world people need to learn that _________ and this story shows us that by ________________.

If there is one lesson I could learn from this story it would be ____________________.

Final Plot Project for The Witch of Blackbird Pond

You have a few choices for your final book project.

1. Write a book review and post it on Amazon.com (you will need to make an account if you don't already have one).
2. Draw a timeline with 8-12 important events. You will also need to include a couple of sentences describing how you decided which events were important to include.
3. Write a "back of the book" review, which will get someone interested in the book, but not give away too much of the story (and NO you can't use the one on the back of the book already!!) :).
4. Choose an event from the book and write a newspaper article as if you were a journalist in that time period. Remember journalists always include who, what, when, where, why, and how!
5. Pretend you are working on filming a movie of this book. Choose background music to go with an event in the book. Include a paragraph that explains why this music is the best background music for this section of the book.

Fix My Paragraph

The Witch of blackbird pond is a book. About a girl named kit who moves from Barbados to america in 1687. Her grand father has died and she is gonna go live with her aunt. the town she moves to is full of Puritans who are much more religious than she is she is constantly doing things that make her look strange to the people in America be cause her culture in Barbados is so different.

***Directions***

Copy and paste this paragraph into your blog and then fix the problems you find. There are a total of 10 mistakes to change. Try to find them all.

Salem Witch Trials Video

We're going to be reading a new book called The Witch of Blackbird Pond. The setting is in New England (the northeast coast of the United States) during the Salem Witch Trials.

Go to the link below to watch a movie about the Salem Witch Trials.

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/salemwitchtrials/story/

After you finish watching the movie, go to your blog and write a summary of the Salem Witch Trials information you learned. Show me that you understand the basics of what happened and why.

Here is another video about what Puritan life in New England was like at this time period.

Book Evaluation

Here are some things to help you get started on your evaluation of the book we just finished, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Here are a few questions to think about to get you started with the evaluation. DON'T answer all these questions in your essay. Think about them to get you started and try to incorporate the answers into your writing:

• What did you like or dislike about it?
• Was it well written?
• Were the characters interesting?
• Could the story be set in another time or place? Would that change the story?
• Why do you think the author wrote this?

And here is a checklist to help with book reviews, but you might find it helpful to get you started with your evaluation.

• Name the book and the author
• Give a short summary of what happened in the book (don't give it all away though!)
• Give your opinion of the book (Examples: exciting, interesting, boring, educational)
• Support your opinion with examples from the book
• Tell your readers whether you would recommend the book and why or why not

You may also focus on a particular aspect of the book (like the characters, the setting, racial issues, how it made you think differently, or something else you want to focus on).

Please do a good job and take your time with this essay. This should be a full essay, not just a paragraph.

Some Days You Just Don't Feel Like Writing...

Some days are difficult. You wake up in a bad mood, or something happens in life that just sets you off on the wrong foot for the day (or the week sometimes!). Even on days like that, it doesn't hurt to get a little something down on your blog. It can be cathartic to write it down, like it helps to get it on the page and let it out. You feel better when you're done and you've gotten a little writing practice in for the day.

Another way to write if you're having a bad day is to use the anger or sadness or whatever emotion you're feeling to help you write something really deep and emotional. Poetry is always good for that. Use your feelings to help you write, rather than getting stuck in them and letting them overrun your life.

Fun Websites

Here are some fun websites that have information and educational stuff on them. Play around with them and enjoy!

Multimedia and Interactive Websites

American Presidency
http://americanhistory.si.edu/presidency/5a_frame.html

Artists’ Toolkit
http://www.artsconnected.org/toolkit/

Bio Medical Lab – the Walker
http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html

Cells Alive!
http://www.cellsalive.com

Coolmath
http://coolmath.com

Create-A-Graph
http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/

Discovery Games
http://dsc.discovery.com/games/games.html

Educational Web Adventures
http://www.eduweb.com/portfolio/adventure.php

Smithsonian Education
http://smithsonianeducation.org/students/

DNA from the Beginning
http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/

World Wildlife Fund Fun Stuff
http://www.worldwildlife.org/fun

British History: Battlefield Academy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/launch_gms_bfacademy.shtml

Visualisation

San Francisco Crimespotting
http://sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org/

Worldmapper
http://www.worldmapper.org/

Gesture-based computing
(this one is a little farther on the horizon and the technology is not built into your own computers right now, so you'll have to simply look at some of the possibilities)

Aukland Museum: The Hybridiser
http://vimeo.com/6580702

Mgestyk
http://www.mgestyk.com/videos.html

mt Multitouch Table
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCpzZk0JNOw

From Emerging Technologies class at WOU, Prof. Mary Bucy.