The 19th Amendment

Constitution Test

REMINDER: The U.S. Constitution Test will be taken on Wednesday, January 28th.

Constitutional Law Competition

How a Bill Becomes a Law

Here are two very different takes on the process by which a bill becomes a law. The first is the famous "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rocks. The second is a scene from the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in which a naive new senator's secretary explains the difficulty of actually getting a bill passed.

CONSTITUTION TEST!!!!!!!

The Constitution Test will be on Wednesday, January 28th. Study Guides will go out either Monday or Tuesday of this week.

E-mail me if you have any questions.

Still Learning

I've been playing around with our new Smart software. Here is an experimental video I made with the program reviewing the Legislative Branch.

Three Branches Quiz

Take the quiz below for Extra Credit (and to help prepare for the Constitution Test). The answers will be sent to me. Don't forget to fill your name in.

The Three Branches of Government

The Preamble

the Preamble of the Constitution is a single sentence introduction to the document. It states the purpose of the new form of government with its six goals:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Here is the Schoolhouse Rocks video that teaches about the Preamble:


This video is from the Andy Griffith Show (from the 1960's). In it, the character of Barney claims that he still remembers the entire Preamble from when he learned it in grade school. Watch and see how well he really remembers it:

The Consitutional Convention - An Overview

The Declaration of Indpendence, Illustrated Children's Version

Happy Thanksgiving

President Franklin Roosevelt proclaims a National Day of Thanksgiving:


Charlie Brown Thanksgiving:

Kermit the Frog Helps Write "Yankee Doodle"

The Declaration of Indepence from the Mini-Series "John Adams"

Ben Franklin on the Continental Congress

An actor portraying Benjamin Franklin shares some of Franklin's thoughts on the Continental Congress:

No More Kings

Sit Down John

As we complete our Declaration of Independence, Illustrated Children's Version we are viewing my favorite movie: 1776. Here is one of my favorite scenes/songs from the film:

From Picking Cotton to Picking Presidents

Overlaid:


The images above and the text below were copied from the site http://strangemaps.wordpress.com.
Both these maps show the same segment of the southern United States, and demonstrate a similar pattern. Yet each describes a wholly other era and a completely different process.

The bottom map dates from 1860 (i.e. the eve of the Civil War), and indicates where cotton was produced at that time, each dot representing 2,000 bales of the stuff. Cotton was King back then, and mainly so in the densely cultivated border area between Louisiana and Mississippi, and in an equally dense band of cotton cultivation starting west of the Mississippi-Alabama line, tapering out across Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Other cotton centres are the areas around Memphis and what appears to be Lawrenceburg in southern Tennessee.

The top map dates from 2008, and shows the results of the recent presidential election, on county level. Blue counties voted for Obama, red ones for McCain (darker hues representing larger majorities). In spite of Obama’s national victory, and barring Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, all Southern states (i.e. all states formerly belonging to the Confederacy) went for McCain. The pattern of pro-Obama counties in those southern states corresponds strikingly with the cotton-picking areas of the 1860s, especially along the Louisiana-Mississippi and Mississippi-Alabama borders (the pattern corresponds less strikingly and deviates significantly elsewhere).

The link between these two maps is not causal, but correlational, and the correlation is African-Americans. Once they were the slaves on whom the cotton economy had to rely for harvesting. Despite an outward migration towards the Northern cities, their settlement pattern now still closely corresponds to that of those days.

During the Democratic primary, many African-American voters supported Hillary Clinton, thinking it unlikely Barack Obama would win the nomination, let alone the presidency. When it became apparent that Obama had a good shot at the nomination (and thereafter at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself), their support for Obama became near monolithic. As it turns out, president-elect Obama won with the an overall support of 53%, but that includes over 90% of black voters (1).

And while their votes did not swing their states towards ‘their’ (2) candidate, the measure in which black residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina voted for Obama is remarkable in that this particular voting pattern still corresponds with settlement patterns of almost a century and a half ago.

Declaration of Independance Children's Book

Students are currently working on their "Illustrated Children's Version" of the Declaration of Independence. They have rephrased key excerpts from the document into words that an elementary school student could understand and now they are putting the words and images together to make a book.

Interactive Whiteboard Fun!

Recently we have been using our new interactive whiteboard in class. Usually this type of technology costs a few thousand dollars to outfit one classroom, however the school district did some research online and learned how to configure a similar setup using only a Wii controller and an infra-red pen-light.

The interactive whiteboard works like a touchscreen, allowing students to digitially draw, write, or annotate on anything projected by the computer. So far we have used this technology to examine and annotate historical images, to better understand the electoral process, and to model assignments.

Students shared the images they drew in response to Preview 6 ("Describe a situation in which you could have used the words: 'It was the last straw'"):

Before begininning Activity Notes 6 (repharsing excerpts from the Declaration of Independance), we did a couple of examples together as a class:

In the days before the presidential election, students made predictions about how they thought each state would vote. By simply touching the states on the screen they could turn them red or blue (just like on CNN!):