My students will be crafting their thesis statements for their essays today. As a pre-cursor to thesis creation, I had them complete a “Values Activity Sheet” from pg. 13 of the “This I Believe” Middle School Curriculum Guide. These were the values that seemed to be most important to them as a class. Hence, I used Bubbl.us to create a web of the words they chose (and used Wordsmyth.net to come up with uniform definitions of each word) so as to help them see what they thought was important to them as a whole. (I felt that these words are also closely linked to the work we did around Voice + Silence, which is going to be the focus of their research-based essays, which you can read more about by clicking here.)
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I’m not actually using the “This I Believe Curriculum Guide” after the kids create their thesis statements; I’m using my own curriculum, which my colleagues and I are writing. However, you can find the “This I Believe” Curriculum at http://thisibelieve.org/educationoutreach.html.
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I want to use this next year–where did you get the curriculum guide?
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