African-American History Essay, The Titanic, and Lit Circles (Oct 29-Nov 2)
Monday
On Monday in Quest Science we got a chance to reflect on our trip to the African American Museum of Natural History and had a brief Meeting for Worship too. We wrote a reflection and described things we enjoyed and things that we wanted to do. In Quest Humanities we got to choose our event or person for our African-American essay. The essay must be 1200-2000 words at least and reflect multiple points of view on your selected person or event. We started the year off learning the “dirty truth” about Columbus and how the story can be told differently from different point of views. The point of the essay is to learn how stories are changed over time. Not only are we learning new material, but also practicing old skills. We will bring in the story analyzing skills so we can better understand articles on our subject. We were also able to practice annotating poems in Brown Girl Dreaming. We had to point out the tone, intent, and language. -Tori
Tuesday
Today in Quest Science we started watching a Titanic documentary on how the the Titanic really sank. You would think the Titanic sank because it hit the iceberg but there is so much more to it . I think this is very interesting because we learned a lot of new things about why the titanic sank. One reason it said the titanic said was because they were worried about cost and how the ship looked like. Also in quest humanities we got our person for our African-American project and we started doing our research. -Leo
Wednesday- No school
Thursday
Our newest quest humanities project is literature circles. In Quest Humanities today we got our literature circle groups and also annotated various poems. We get a group of three or four people and each group gets assigned a theme to find in the book Brown Girl Dreaming. Brown Girl Dreaming is a autobiography written by Jacqueline Woodson and is told in poems. We practiced breaking down different poems as practice for when we have to find our theme in BGD. For example my groups theme was religion and spirituality so we went through all of part 1 in BGD looking for that theme. Then we had to write a 2-3 page essay about what we found. If you finished early you could start working on your African American history essay. -Marina
Friday
In Quest Science on Friday, we were able to make foil boats that can hold marbles. The experiment was interesting and confusing at the same time because some of the designs were the same, but they couldn’t all hold the same amount of marbles. After watching a documentary on how the titanic sank, Mrs. Bruvik wanted us to find out how to make a boat that would contain the weight of the marbles we used. In one of our Quest Humanities classes we got to work on annotating poems in BGD. In our other humanities class, we learned about primary and secondary sources we could use for our African-American essay with our library teacher Mrs Phiambolis. -Tori