Culture, Day 4 - Class Recap

I really like this picture I took of a kid (I have no idea who it is) at Trillium Lake by Mt. Hood, over the summer. Fishing could be a part of his family culture!

Dear class,

I enjoyed hearing some of your Nacirema stories today in class! We also started looking at school as a part of culture, which is something we are going to investigate a lot over the coming days. Here's the recap for today:

Learning Targets:
Knowledge LT 16: I can explain how culture both reflects and shapes society.

Soundtrack: "Abc" by Jackson 5. Selected because it relates to the theme of school and culture. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 10/21/14:
News Brief – Tarence
Nacirema Stories
Time for School
Create Questions

Homework: Read the blog. Turn in missing/incomplete geography work ASAP. Next news brief: Zachary V. (and Tarence).

News Brief: Tarence was not in class today, so we did not have a student presented news brief. We did talk about what was happening in the world (including the trip I booked last night to India for Spring Break)! Finally, we talked about anything interesting that happened over the weekend, before watching VICE News "Beyond The Headlines" for today. Thanks, everyone! Zach V, you are up next.

Nacirema Stories: This was homework to complete, so I began class by having students randomly get into seven groups and share your stories to the group members, while trying to guess what the story was about. Then, the group elected the best story from the group to share out to the class as a whole. I really enjoyed hearing these! Please keep the Nacirema stories to turn in as part of a collection of evidence for the Culture unit (like we did for Geography).

Time For School: I really like this documentary as part of our unit on culture, because it is especially interesting to me to see how school is a part of different cultures around the world. Here was the handout that I gave to students to fill out as we were watching:

Google Drive - Time For School Documentary Handout

Again, the point to this was to analyze how we see surface culture and what deeper culture is like in different areas around the world.

We got about 34:50 in to the following video, if you missed class and need to catch up, or simply want to review it again:

PBS.org - Time For School 3 (Part 1) Documentary

I hope you are finding this interesting and engaging! :-)

Create Questions: Finally, at the end of class, we created a few questions for the exchange students who are going to be visiting with us next class and talking about their culture. One is from Brazil (Laura), one is from Norway (Geir), and one is from South Korea (Jerry). I wanted students to think of at least three questions to try to dig beneath the top of the iceberg. Next class, it should be fun to talk with our exchange students! See you then!