Learning to Share Information (5 days)
1.Today we are going to start a research project on Greek gods. We started reading A True Book: Ancient Greece in shared reading today. One of the things that was really important to the ancient Greeks was religion. They believed in many gods and they believed that their gods looked and acted like humans, but had incredible powers and lived forever.
2. Yesterday you chose which god you were going to be an expert on. I have the list up here. Also, you started to research and write notes on your graphic organizer. I showed you how to make sections to take notes in and how to add more to each section as you read through different sources.
3. For the past two days, you have been working hard to gather information about your gods. All of you have several sections filled in. Some of those sections have lots of information and some of those sections only have one or two facts. Today we are going to talk about deciding which information to keep and which information to get rid of.
4. Yesterday you worked on choosing information to share in your infographic. Today you will need to begin planning how you will want your infographic to look.
5. Yesterday you used your graphic organizer to plan your infographic. Today you can start making your infographic.
Sharing

Database of Hebrew and Arabic texts recovered by a US Army team in Iraq. Primary Resources/Authentic Texts. The restoration and preservation of these documents is explained.

Ibn Battuta is considered one of the world's greatest travelers. During the 14th century, he traveled an estimated 75,000 miles across most of the Eastern Hemisphere, three times farther than Marco Polo, in search of knowledge and for the love of travel. In today's world, this encompasses over 40 countries. To share the learning and research so highly valued by Islamic culture, the Sultan of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, wanted Ibn Battuta's worldwide travels records and published when he returned home to Morocco after almost 20 years. Buttuta's reminiscences where chronicled in a jourla called The Rila and documents this enormous achievement. Ibn Battuta's journey gives us a first-hand account of life in the 14th-century Muslim world, while offering a glimpse of the world through the perspective of an education "cosmopolitan." The original book, handwritten in Arabic, can be viewed today at the National Library in Paris.

From a team of Puerto Rican journalists, musicians and artists, "La Brega" is a 7-part podcast series that opens doors to the Puerto Rican experience, co-pro...

The most important festival in the Chinese calendar is the New Year or Spring Festival. One of the annual events used to commemorate the festival is a colorful parade complete with animated dragon and lion figures.

In the first activity the student will learn the major differences between Eastern and Western dragons and discover why Eastern dragons are associated with Chinese New Year. They will hear a story about how the dragons came to rule major rivers of China. In the second activity, they will also learn about the Chinese New Year Dragon Parade and discover why firecrackers are used to drive off evil spirits, especially one called the Nian. In the third activity the students will see images of parading dragons, including sound-enhanced video and read poems about the New Year. In the fourth lesson the students will discover that the Chinese lion has imaginary characteristics similar to the dragon. They will view images of the lion and hear about how this highly stylized beast once fought the ferocious Nian. They will learn about the lion dancers in the New Year parade and compare them to the dragon dancers. Finally they will make their own lion masks.

Pop culture and the classroom collide in this lesson when students go behind the scenes to analyze a television series for characterization to use in an original television show proposal.

Attention high school Spanish teachers! This is a Webquest that I created to be used as a group project in a High School Spanish I class. It is a cultural learning project spanning three weeks for classroom groups composed of four students. Within each group, each student will carry out one of four different roles/tasks in preparation for an imaginary trip that the class is going to make to Mexico and Central America. Each group will have the option of choosing to research one of the seven countries included, which can accommodate a classroom of up to 28 students under the parameters given. The nice thing about this project is that each group will give a presentation on a different country which will broaden the students' cultural knowledge of Mexico and Central America. This project is intended for high school Spanish students but could also be used for middle school. The only technology needed is a computer, projector, and an internet connection. ¡Que lo disfruten!

This Wide Angle video provides an introduction to the four personable female stars of Sweet Talk, a popular television show in the Arab world.

A career with NOAA could launch you all over the world, from the warm waters of the Caribbean to the winter wonders of the South Pole. The challenges are endless. Employment in NOAA is a job with a mission. At NOAA, safeguarding the public, protecting natural resources, strengthening the economy. It's all in a day's work. Imagine yourself. Careers in NOAA are as diverse as the line offices that make up the agency. More information can be found on the Office of Workforce Management website.

This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.

Engage middle school students in a meaningful study of the lives of students from across the globe through the use of contemporary nonfiction and fiction. Students create personal autobiographies, sequence story events, and prepare well-crafted summaries while learning to use higher-level comprehension strategies such as Question-Answer Relationships and the Bio-Cube. Additionally, students conduct a critical study of the NCSS Notable Tradebook Nasreen̍s Secret School: A True Story From Afghanistan by Jeanette Winter, comparing and contrasting their own lives to Nasreen̍s and expanding their geographical knowledge of the Middle East.

Where did the stars come from? What makes lightning and thunder? Pourquoi tales are narratives developed by various cultures around the world to explain natural phenomena. Students study three tales and learn about their cultures of origin, then work cooperatively to write and present an original pourquoi tale.

Native Americans responded to U.S. expansion policy in different ways. By incorporating Internet resources and working in groups, students will participate in a game show to share the information they have uncovered in a fast-paced, competitive environment. At the end of the game, the winning team receives a prize.

Week 29, Day 1---Day 5
D is for Dancing Dragon: A China Alphabet
"This book is called D is for Dancing Dragon: A China Alphabet. It was written by Carol Crane and illustrated by Zong-Zhou Wang.
You might think that an alphabet book is for kindergartners, but this is no ordinary alphabet book. That’s because it also teaches us about China. On the first page, you can see a map of China, which is a country on the other side of the world."
Introduce Book and Preview Technical Vocabulary
Teach Text Structure
Model a Comprehension Strategy and Ask Questions During Reading
Engage Students in Discussion
Update Text Structure Anchor Chart
Teach Sentence Composing
Assign or Model Written Response
visual: comparison chart
Review and Share Written Responses
*Planning Notes
This is an unconventional alphabet book because of the extensive background information about the word that is given for each letter. We have chosen to use the first 5 days for instruction. If you have extra time, you could read additional segments.

In Unit 2, students move from analyzing challenges others face in accessing schools to more specifically analyzing challenges others face in accessing books. Students closely read excerpts from My Librarian Is a Camel by Margriet Ruurs, which describes ways people living in different countries around the world access books. For a mid-unit assessment, students demonstrate their reading skills by reading a new excerpt from this book and determining its main idea.
In the second half of the unit, students switch gears to begin writing informative texts. Using what they have learned about reading informational texts in the first half of the unit, they plan, write, revise, and edit an informative paragraph describing how people in a particular country overcome the challenge of access to books. For the End of Unit 2 Assessment, students write a new informative paragraph describing the challenge and how it was overcome, using evidence from the excerpt from My Librarian Is a Camel read for the mid-unit assessment.

This lesson reviews the Spanish verb GUSTAR - it's conjugation, use with nouns and infinitives, and using it in the Simple Form versus the Emphasis & Clarity Form.

Jeannette Ehlers is a Danish-Trinidadian multi disciplinary visual artist who aims to disrupt the dominating narratives and replace them with ones that acknowledge the aspects of history that have thus far been ignored. Ehlers engages themes of visibility, identity, and collective memory, such as her work I am Queen Mary, which represents one of four queens who led the 1878 labor revolt in Saint Croix, a former Danish colony.

Presenting her works at the sixth MAD Symposium, Ehlers discusses how it is possible to reframe history so that it is inclusive to all and provides examples how to do so through her works. Ehlers engages us, urging us to see how art, and other mediums like food, can provoke, lead and guide, people to better self-understanding.

Michael Miller is the co-founder of the London and New York Meditation Center. Miller regularly teaches all across the globe, introducing the ancient technique of Vedic Meditation in a way that is accessible and relevant to people living in today's world.

Interweaving practical techniques with vocal advice, Miller compels us to see how meditation can make us more available, responsive, and active in our lives. By tuning in to, and ridding ourselves of stress we can create better kitchen environments, he argues.

About MAD:
MAD is a non-profit transforming our food system by giving chefs and restaurateurs the skills, community, time, and space to create real and sustainable change in their restaurants, their communities, and across the world.

This art history video discussion examines Auguste Rodin's "The Gates of Hell" 1880-1917, plaster (Musee d'Orsay, Paris).When the building, earlier on the site of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, was destroyed by fire during the Commune in 1871, plans were drawn up to replace it with a museum of decorative arts. Rodin won the competition to design a great set of doors for its entry way. Although the museum was never built, Rodin continued to work on the doors. They became an ongoing project; a grand stage for his sculptural ideas. It's fitting that the plaster of this great unfinished sculpture, The Gates of Hell, is now on display at the d'Orsay, the former railway terminal that was built on this site instead of the museum of decorative arts and that, by lovely coincidence, was converted into one of the world's great art museums.

This site examines the history of transportation in America, early history of mail service, the Civil War, West Point, profiles of U.S. presidents, Lakota winter counts, Lewis and Clark as naturalists, Japanese Americans during World War II, Brown v. Board of Education, athletes who broke social barriers, how voting systems have evolved, September 11, and America's wars.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.

This resource includes a database of Trans-Atlantic slaving voyages searchable by a wide range of variables in additional to essays, maps, and numerical estimates of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and K-12 lesson plans.