Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Culture, Day 2 - Class Recap


Another part of my culture is having dual citizenship, due to my mom being born and raised in the United Kingdom.

Dear students,

Today, we got back to work on our new unit of culture. We learned a little bit more about the "iceberg" model for it. I also made sure that everyone had their geography packets graded and back, so you know what to improve on. Here's what happened today:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 15: I can explain how culture both reflects and shapes society.

Soundtrack: "American Pie" by Don McLean. Selected for today because we were talking more about American culture, and this song famously contains lots of references to it. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 10/12/16:
News Brief – Alex
NG Slides
Our Culture
Cornell Notes

Homework: Read the blog. Check your grade in Student VUE and improve it by Thursday, if possible. Next news brief: John.

Grades/News Brief: I wanted to make sure to explain how I assigned grades for the Geography unit and packet. I wrote comments on your self-reflection papers, which I would appreciate you reading. You should always know exactly what you have and how to improve it! I will definitely accept revised work, so please do it correctly and thoroughly, and get it to me as fast as possible so we all don't have to stress even more about it. It's still early - you have time, but don't dig yourself a huge hole right now. Let me know how I can help!

Alex brought in this article to talk about for the news brief today: TheGuardian.com - China's 'extinct' dolphin may have returned to Yangtze river, say conservationists. We found China in the world map packet (the Asia map) and we discussed this interesting environmental story. John was assigned the next news brief.

Next, we checked in about the weekend. A long three days for everyone! I was also asked about finding good flight deals, and showed: TheFlightDeal.com to the class. :-)

We also watched the one minute BBC World News update. Here's the link to see the latest one minute update, at any time of day (it will probably be different from what we watched in class):

NG Slides: After the news, we finished the National Geographic culture slides activity from last class. I passed out this sheet:


I had students guess about what culture is with the top space on the worksheet, then we brainstormed as a class all the different aspects that could go in the second box, of 10 characteristics of culture.

After that, we went through this slideshow of pictures from the National Geographic Photography: Culture website. Here are the photos we went through:


I love all of these pictures because the world is such a diverse and interesting place! I enjoyed the class guesses as to what was going on in each.

Our Culture: After the slides, we moved on to looking at what our own culture is like. I split students up into groups and had each group brainstorm the following: What is our culture like? With your group, brainstorm aspects of what culture is like at the following three levels. Use your culture traits from the slideshow last class!

American Culture
Portland/Beaverton Culture
Westview Culture

I had a lot of fun listening to the examples given for each of these, which did do a good job of highlighting different elements of culture!

This took longer than I expected to go through together, but that's okay. I think it was really fun and productive in understanding culture.

Cornell Notes: This is a note-taking strategy that we are going to be using frequently this year at Westview - especially if you are at all familiar with the AVID class. There were two handouts that went with this:



We went through both of these together, as I made sure to talk about the way in which Cornell Notes help with retaining information. We will look at these together next class! Here's the PowerPoint on culture that I wanted notes to be taken on (we were only able to get to the first slide today in class, so we will continue this next time):


Really, the Iceberg Model is all about what we cannot see. Last class, the National Geographic slides that we went through were all surface level culture. I want everyone to start thinking about DEEP culture - what is ingrained in us and we do not even think about.

That was it for the day! See you next class! :-)

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