This Week in US History

This week we are continuing our study of Progressive Politics. While last week's study focused on Theodore Roosevelt, this week we will wrap up with Woodrow Wilson and his New Freedom.

Monday - Today we are meeting Woodrow Wilson, beginning with a short reading about his life before the presidency. We will end the day by completing a Frayer Model (Learn more here.) about Wilson's New Freedom. And just like last week, I changed the last box in the activity so that instead of drawing an image, students will compare Wilson's policies to those of his predecessors.

Tuesday and Wednesday - Students will spend two days completing an Iron Chef Activity (Learn more here.) to dig deeper into Wilson's policies. Like last week, students will work primarily on their own to explore the "ingredients" in Wilson's New Freedom as well as to connect those ideas to people we have studied in our previous lessons. This went very well last week and allowed me to focus my attention on the students who most needed my help. Also like last week, students finish by using what they learn to answer a series of questions and finally draw conclusions about the Wilson Administration. This will serve as a study guide for the section.

Thursday and Friday - Students will end the week by creating a digital magazine highlighting the policies of either Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, or Debs (the candidate in the Election of 1912). The template I created will allow them to easily produce a professional-looking final product while focusing on the important ideas rather than the design. 

And because it has continued to work well, students will also practice the vocabulary words essential to this section with the Fast and Curious protocol (Learn more here.). Our goal is to complete this process three times this week, improving our class averages each time. So far, students have really enjoyed this and have been very excited to watch their scores go up.