If you enjoyed senet, you’ll love the ancient board game we play during our India unit: Snakes and Ladders!! Actually, if you loved senet, which is a game of skill and strategy, you might HATE snakes and ladders. Cold, capricious,
The topics we cover in ancient history may seem a bit irrelevant to some (foolish) kids, but when we use hands-on, project-based learning, we give our students a tangible, memorable connection to the material they are learning. Conveniently, most ancient
Kids just love studying ancient Egypt. I never have a hard time getting them fired up about studying pyramids and mummies, as you can see from the KWL chart my 8th graders started below: (As a side note, I always
Teaching world history in a single year provides me with some exceptional challenges. We cover so much content in such a short time that I really have to remain on track and make tough decisions about what we can and can’t
A brief look into my own continuing education today. Our Archbishop recently sent a letter to all the schools that included some suggested reading from a chapter in Tom Wood’s How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. As I teach
I am always on the lookout for resources that make math more fun and exciting for kids. Several years ago, a colleague of mine loaned me a copy of Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland to read to
In order to keep them from crawling up the walls in their last week before summer vacation, I’ve given my seventh graders a tessellation project. There are about ten million youtube videos explaining how to do this, so I won’t
In 7th grade math, we’re working on area. Â We’ve gone through all of the basic formulas with careful attention to how they are related to one another — the triangle being half of a rectangle, the trapezoid being a combination
When teaching basic geometry concepts, such as perimeter and area, you will save yourself quite a bit of grief if you start by making clear the difference between units and square units. Our common abbreviations for these, such as cm
Monday I asked my students to determine whether this triangle was equilateral, isosceles, or scalene, and to prove their answer. The hint is in the post title: this is a Pythagorean Theorem activity. Here is the original triangle: If you said