Causes of the Civil War: Compromise of 1850

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Life in Sparta and Athens: Group Project and Leveled Readings!!!!

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Mystery Location Calls - We Can't Get Enough!!!

This year I have absolutely fallen in love with Mystery Location Calls.  If you don't know anything about them, stop right now, head on over to Paul Solarz's blog and read up on how to challenge your students and increase their geographic awareness.

Are you back?  Great!  So I started doing Mystery Location Calls after I had my 8th-grade students memorize their 50 states and I have never seen kids really internalize their states like they did after we did just a couple of practice calls.  They have such a spatial understanding of the country, have increased their independent internet researching skills, and have done a nice job at really learning to work together.

My students are obsessed with them now and want to do them all the time!  The only thing I am struggling with is how to incorporate everyone.  I have 27 kids in each class and even though they each have a job, a good ten kids just sit in the back of the class and fool around.  I was thinking about having a Team A and Team B and teams take turns being the primary jobs for each Location Call.

Do you have any suggestions?  Also, if you would like to connect our classes, hit me up in the comments!!!!

We saved Egypt! A Quest into Gamification

Hey, all!  I am so sorry it has been so long since I wrote.  This semester I got an amazing opportunity to start teaching a graduate class.  I am teaching this fabulous class called, “Creating a Technology-Rich Classroom. It is such a blast to teach but it has definitely taken over my blogging time!

Things have been fabulous in my class lately.  Around the holidays, I delved deeper into my fascination with all things PIRATE (read Dave Burgesses’ Teach Like a Pirate and you will understand!) and read Explore Like a PIRATE: Gamification and Game-Inspired Course Design to Engage, Enrich and Elevate Your Learners.  Michael Matera is an amazing middle school teacher who has entirely gamified his classroom.  In his class students go on quests to learn new topics and solve problems.  I tried to do a Rome Quest last year and was minimally successful.  After reading this I decided to go all in and create a quest for Egypt.

Step 1: I came up with my backstory.  To get the kids hooked you need a reason to “quest”.  I created this video using PowerPoint and iMovie to launch the story.

I set up a locker for each of my classes like this:

Inside each locker was this:

I set all this up before the launch of the activity to build excitement.

Step 2: I organized all the assignments I wanted them to complete for the unit and assigned XP (experience points) to them based on how much effort they each took.

I created placards that explained the assignments so the kids could complete them independently and at their own pace.

If you look at the assignment sheet you will see a whole area of assignments called sidequests.  Michael Matera does an amazing job outlining them in his book so definitely GO BUY IT!  It is a perfect summer read.

In a nutshell, though a sidequest is an "extra" activity.  These activities do not have to be completed but they do make the quest progress quickly.  For me, these assignments are awesome guided and independent activities that allow your students to delve deeper into topics.  This is a perfect way to differentiate for your high flyers!

Step 3:  I placed the kids onto four teams.  Each team was named after a major Egyptian god.  Each team was assigned one of the locked locks on the locker.  This lock had a three-digit number as a combination.  The object of the game was to solve puzzles to find the numbers to unlock the lock.   This is where things get tricky but this year I got a handle on it with a little help from my internet buddies.

The goal of the game is to earn XP.  As each person earned XP, they moved up the ranks of Egyptian society from slave to pharaoh.  When a team earned an average of 425 XP they got to go on a clue quest and solve a puzzle to learn the first number.  We considered this "clearing gate 1".  This repeated for two more  gates until they had all three numbers and could open their lock.

Last year when I tried this, the amount of scorekeeping and data that was needed to be managed was way too overwhelming.  I spent my year investigating easier ways and I finally stumbled upon a genius that created a spreadsheet for tracking in Google Spreadsheets and Forms.  

With this sheet, I was able to wrangle all the information, project on the board, and let the kids see where they stood!

Students listed by XP earned

Alphabetical list of students, Total XP, Level, and Guild

Full Chart

Total XP earned by each guild

This is what I used to progress guilds to gates.  When their average was 425, they were able to go on their first clue quest to open Gate 1 and receive their first number.

Seriously, this entire spreadsheet saved my life and made this an enjoyable experience!

Step 4: I created the Clue Quests to clear each gate.  These were fun!  If you really love solving puzzles look on over to BreakoutEDU.  It is an amazing resource and community for educators creating fabulous puzzles to challenge their students.  I have large classes, so I decided to incorporate some of the themes into this activity.

Once each group (guild in the spreadsheet) earned an average of 425 XP they received this:

The QR code led to a question, the answer to the question was the password to unlock a website that brought them to their first number.

On the next gate they received this:

Once they solved the puzzle it brought them to an activity in the hallway where their number was hidden.

The last gate involved invisible ink and a UV pen!

The kids absolutely loooooooooved this activity.  I got about 95% completion of all the activities and total buy-in from the kids.  When they opened their locks and earned their day out both classes cheered!  I was able to accommodate for my struggling learners as they approached each activity and I was able to push my high flyers who started to compete with each other to see how many side quests they could do.  I can't wait to do it again and I'm already working on one for my American Revolution unit that focuses on the Culper Spy Ring!