IEW- Week 9

It was so wonderful to hear such fabulous reports! I just love the days when we can hear their papers in their own voice and see their eyes sparkle when they read something that they just know they wrote extra special! For me, this is the icing on the IEW cake. It is my fervent hope to have time next week to let the rest of the classes read their papers.

Yea!- we kicked off our Faces of History report. Hopefully, the extra handout packet will help you walk through the process at home. Please feel free to shoot me an email about anything that puts a hitch in things. Time in class is so short and there are always more questions than we have time to get to.

This report is a culmination of everything that we have done in class so far with an added twist. When the paper itself is written, we will use it as the basis for a first person monologue. Ideally the graduating students will be so familiar with their own work that they only need keyword notes on note cards to present it. Of course this is way too high of an expectation for the younger and more shy students so don't let this scare you or them! It goes back to the one room school house idea of letting the younger children see what the bigger kiddos can do and be inspired to work towards those goals. As I said in class, we will work on this together on week 11 and 12. I know that for many adults the greatest fear is public speaking so please, please, please communicate with me about this if you have any hesitation or concern. My heart is to inspire each student to be all that they can be and not for one second allow anyone to become fearful or intimidated. I do not ever want my own enthusiasm to become something that brings stress to the tender-hearted students that I so dearly treasure!

So, what to do this week? Nail down your topic if you haven't already and then narrow that down to 3 specific aspects of that topic so that you can then build 3 body paragraphs around those aspects. Begin your research and work on those KWO/Fused outlines. If at all possible, I would love for everyone to bring in at least one rough draft paragraph next week so that we can spend some class time working on dress-ups and sentence openers. Also, if everyone has their bibliography information with them, we can work on that too. Because the bib. info. is not given to you in an easy to use format like it was for the Knights report it may be more difficult to sort and use so I would love to be able to work together on it.

Here is a thumbnail of my intended class time for the next 3 weeks:

Week 10- work on adding dress-ups and sentence openers on our rough draft body paragraphs and begin working on our bibliographies BRING: AT LEAST ONE ROUGH DRAFT PARAGRAPH AND AS MANY REFERENCES AS YOU HAVE

Week 11- work on turning our research paper into a first person oral report and talk about creative/dramatic introductions and conclusions BRING: YOUR ROUGH DRAFT PAPER WITH INTRO/CONCLUSION IDEAS

Week 12- work on public speaking skills and practice reading our papers with dramatic flair BRING: YOUR FINISHED REPORT (You are still free to make adjustments if you would like to.)

Thursday November 21: If at all possible, I would love to have a dress rehearsal with the students at 2:00 at Christ Community. Dinner will begin at 6:00 :) We need a head count ASAP so we can make arrangements for food. A family meal that serves 4-6 depending on your appetite will be $10. The menu includes rustic bread, roasted chicken, vegetables,  and dessert.

Don't forget to think about costume ideas!

Here's the list of chosen topics:
Andrew: The Bard
Sydney: Robin Hood and Maid Marian
Jessica: Queen Elizabeth I
Zoe Zielny: Feudalism ?
Rachel: Catherine of Aragon
Abbey Stewart: Isabella of Spain or Eleanor of Aquitaine
Will: Charlemagne ?
Luke: Castles
Ginny: Genghis khan
Abigail: Elizabeth Woodvill
Jennings: Medieval fashion
Sarah mackenzie: Medieval Entertainment
Mary Blake: Architecture
Grace: Marco Polo
Abby Stegall: Shakespeare
Hannah: Napoleon Bonaparte
Jeremy: the Hundreds Year War
Jacob: Medieval Food

We ended up with many personal letters to go into our Indonesia care package and we raised $61! What isn't needed to mail this package will be set aside for the next one. It will be so exciting to get a response from around the world! Click here to read the latest update from their blog. Do be sensitive in leaving comments as we mentioned in class.

See you next week, can you believe we are nearing the end of our first semester together?
Melissa