Today in our Writing History class, we incorporated the filters we created yesterday as writers being storytellers by examining the choices people make and the results of their consequences. Writers are scientists who create theories about events in history and research evidence supporting those theories as they test for validity. And finally, writers act as lawyers who review arguments and the evidence supporting the argument.

We were able to put our first efforts of writing about the Burning of the Capital and Dolly Madison into practice as we were in the lab.  Students were busy typing their story or continuing to research before they began the writing process.  As pieces of writing are deemed “complete” by the author, we will share with peer partners and begin the editing process.

At the end of the day, we began exploring the life of Frederick Douglass as we reviewed his Hypocrisy of the Nation Must Be Exposed speech.  We analyzed the speech with our steps of identifying what is happening, building context, evaluating the parts of an argument made in his speech, and analyzing for potential biases.

The students are learning how to narrow their topics to aspects that are interesting to them and filling in the gaps with more research.

Dinner time conversation topics: