Finishing Feudalism, Touring Europe, Writing about the Church

To start, I know that many students have been waiting patiently for me to update their grades.  Over the weekend I inserted a bunch of scores, so you should see that reflected in your online grades.

In terms of class activities, this past week we finished chapter 2 about the social structure of the middle ages. I placed a poll on Edmodo, our class microblogging platform, asking students about which social class they would rather have been born into in the middle ages. Here are the results:

On Thursday we began our next lesson, about the influence of the church on life in Europe during the middle ages. We are in the midst of a pretty neat activity that I call a "Tour of Europe".  I have placed the students into 6 groups. Each group gets to discuss and read a section of the textbook, as well as engage in an activty to help them learn about an aspect of the church. For example, one group is learning about holidays, which they now know are actually holy-days. They listen to two different pieces of music and discuss the differences. Another group is learning about medieval church art and achitecture, so they get to build a gargoyle out of playdough. Here's a picture of one such gargoyle:

This week we will continue learning about the church.  And, for our summative assessment, we will do a small project which involves the students writing a short poem, rather than taking a quiz.  You can view the assignment sheet here:
The Church Poem

Also, the scoring guide that I will use to evaluate them can be viewed here:
The Church Poem Scoring Guide

Finally, a sample of the work that students have done in the past is here: 

I hope that gives you a good sense of what we've been up to and where we're headed.  As always, if you have any comments or questions, you can use the comment feature at the end of each blog post if you're reading this on your email, click here