It was so great having just collected my thoughts around main lesson rhythm in my recent set of posts. I’m finding that having all of those brainstormed ideas is coming in really handy!
After having gone over Mesopotamia, the “fertile crescent,” and why it is called “The Cradle of Civilization” yesterday, today I decided to do a little check in to see how many students really stayed with me. Because we so often recall together as a class, there are certainly students who ride on their classmates coattails and don’t really push themselves to make sure they remember the content themselves.
Today I decided to address that issue. Without giving any coaching ahead of time, no brainstorming a list of words on the chalkboard, no recalling it verbally together first, I asked the students a question about Mesopotamia and had them write their response individually.
The results were very interesting. Though there were some who set right to work, madly scribbling their answer, there were several students who agonized over it and could hardly put pencil to paper. These are the students, of course, who are meticulous in everything they do and would rather not do it at all than do it incorrectly. I insisted, though, and was a bit surprised to find that everyone knew the answer to my question, just some of them had a hard time with the mechanics of articulating their answer.
Tomorrow we’ll do something a little more fun and engaging for the recall (call it a little reward maybe.) Today I told them about Hammurabi’s Code and I gave them a list of examples of the laws. They found them very entertaining and were laughing about them over snack. I’m thinking that tomorrow we’ll do some skits, write a story that shows one of Hammurabi’s laws in action, or even maybe make up some of our own laws.
The story of Gilgamesh will come beginning on Thursday. I’m excited about telling it as I think this story will have some special significance for this class.
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