8 Ekstrom Week In Review Blog Post

This week we worked on writing the first draft of our FRA project. This project is an essay competition with the topic of "The Bill of Rights and Me."

On Monday, we took notes on the Declaration of Independence and worked on writing our own Declaration of Independence. We wrote this based on something that could be annoying to others in class, or to our selves. This was for us to create a document similar to the actual Declaration of Independence, and to practice our cursive (not all of us knew how to write in it) . 

On Tuesday, we started the day by analyzing the list of 27 grievances off of the Declaration of Independence. We made a checklist with a grievance summary, and checking off if it was for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. There was no wrong answer on the checklist, because it was our own opinion. After that, we took notes on democracy for the rest of class, comparing monarchy with democracy. We did not get to finish the notes, but found the different components of the two, and found out how very different they are.

On Wednesday, we read our Battle of the Books book for an hour, taking notes on any challenging words or anything important in the story. After this, we went over the project coming up, the C-SPAN studentcam, where we create a video documentary on what the most important issue congress should focus on in 2014. We discussed having a field trip beach cleanup, where we will walk to Ocean Beach and pick up trash off of the beach. We will also be taking video footage of the surroundings that we walk by. this project will be beneficial for us because it will open our eyes to the world around us. 

Today, we read our Battle of the Books book for the first hour of class, and then had the option to work on our FRA essay or to keep reading. Both were great options, as the due dates for both are coming soon. This gave all of us a chance to catch up on anything we were behind on. It also gave some a chance to edit their partner's essay. It was a great chance for us to get work that we were far behind on done. 

Our homework this week was to write the first draft of our essay and give peer edits to our assigned partners. We also had to fix the peer revisions given to us. Another homework assignment we had was to finish our Declarations of Independence.  

By Charlie Ekstrom