In the last few weeks, 7th and 8th graders have finished up a unit and started a new one! Our identity unit wrapped up with an exploration of our social influencers. Using Miss G's list of influencers from her senior year of high school as a model, each student made a list of the five most influential people currently in their lives and listed known identity markers for each of those people. Students then reflected on trends they noticed among these identity markers and how they might expand or limit their own views of the world and the people in it. For example, students noticed that Miss Gratton spent a lot of time with people who were White, Christian, heterosexual, and able-bodied while she was in high school. They questioned how this might have affected her ability to deeply understand and empathize with people of other races, religions, sexual orientations, and ability statuses. It was wonderful to see how many great observations students were able to make, and we loved the connections some students made back to Chimamanda Ngozi's idea of the single story!
This past week students were introduced to their next unit with a strange message from an unexpected source...the Director of the FBI! Director Skinner (Any X-Files fans out there?) informed students that they had been chosen for a special investigation of monsters. To begin, students worked together to develop a general profile of a monster to help us focus our investigation. (What do monsters look like like? Act like? Feel like?) Director Skinner then sent over case files for each of his agents, instructing them to begin investigating the first of three monster-related cases: A Monster Calls.
Since then, we have spent time each day reading A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, keeping notes on possible suspects, witnesses, and people of interest and formulating questions that might help us further our investigation. It seems pretty obvious to us right now that the yew tree is the monster in the story, but we have a lot of questions about Conor's father, and we are definitely wondering about Harry's role in this case...
We have also been using Bill Rich's four-way thinking model to help us practice skills that will be critical to our investigation: summarizing, interpreting, analyzing, and evaluating. So far we have learned about and practiced summarizing and evaluating. We even made time to evaluate our summaries! We'll see how these skills come into play in our investigation in the coming weeks...
Thanks to Patrick Ness and Bill Rich for this week's lesson ideas and resources. We encourage you to click on their names to learn more about their work.