Culture, Day 7 - Class Recap

A big part of American culture is sports. This was taken at the 2010 Holiday Bowl, before Oregon played Oklahoma State, and won! :-)

Dear class,

Today was a work day, with groups looking at different aspects of American culture, through the Culturegrams reading. This was in preparation for the upcoming unit final, which will be a DBQ (Document Based Question) essay. I'll teach more about that in 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: "Party in the U.S.A." by Miley Cyrus. Selected for today because the in class group activity was analyzing American culture, of which parties are part of social gatherings! Lyrics here.

AGENDA 10/28/14:
News Brief –  Cassidy
Review Time for School
USA Culturegrams
Work Time

Homework: Read the blog. Bring all culture work so far, completed and ready to use in preparation for the DBQ.

 1) Cornell Notes on Culture definitions/iceberg PowerPoint
2) Surface culture worksheet (National Geographic photos PowerPoint)
3) Nacirema writing (neatly written or typed, 200 words minimum)
4) Time for School Notes/Answers
5) USA Culturegram activity (see today's blog)

Next news brief: Joanna.

News Brief: Cassidy had the news brief today and selected this story to talk about: BBC.com - UK ends Afghan combat operations. The article mentions that 453 British soldiers died in Afghanistan, and I showed a website that has deaths of American soldiers and others, as well. We found Afghanistan on our world maps and also watched the VICE News "Beyond the Headlines" clip on YouTube before moving on. Joanna, you have the next news brief!

Review Time for School: We actually didn't delve much into this, because we fully finished Time for School last class, and I was able to give instructions about how to do the questions relating to it, at the bottom of the second page of this worksheet. Please make sure you have finished this!

USA Culturegrams: I split the class up into groups of four, then explained what we were working on. Essentially, it was this handout (a class set, but feel free to use this link online to complete it as homework, if you didn't get to finish in class):

Google Drive - USA Culturegram Reading

Each member of the group was supposed to help by completing one or two of the seven cultural traits that the group chose to do on this worksheet:

Google Drive - USA Culturegram: Summarizing and Analyzing Culture Worksheet

It appeared that the class worked really hard on these, because pens and pencils were flying on the paper! I'm interested to hear about them next class. Please remember to complete the last two questions on the worksheet yourself. Thanks! Again, all of our culture unit work so far will be combined into a collection of evidence, which will be part of the DBQ we are writing (probably next week, in class). See you next class!