Message from ggoldstein

[Anonymous]

I got my principal to let me teach a seventh grade core last year. I will be doing it again in the 2009/2010 school year. I will have two groups of students and will be teaching on a block schedule that gives me four English classes and two history classes. I will teach only three classes every day. I have each group for English every day and one group for history every day. They alternate history every other day. Anyway I wanted to do this because seventh grade history and English lend themselves to doing lots of cross curricular things. The California State standard 3.0 for English states that "students read and respond to historically or culturally significant works of literature that reflect and enhance their studies of history and social science." This allows me to incorporate literature such as Beowulf, Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes and other writers from Europe.

World History and Geography State Standard 7.5 (Students analyze the geographic, political, economic, religious, and social structures of the civilizations of Medieval Japan ) strand 7.5-5 says to "Study the ninth and tenth centuries' golden age of literature, art, and drama and its lasting effects on culture today, including Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji."

Another history standard (7.8-4) allows me to use The Travels of Marco Polo to "understand the effects of the reopening of the ancient silk road between Europe and China, ncluding Marco Polo's travels and the location of his routes."

East Asia in my Classroom has helped me become more familiar with the Far East part of my curriculum for history and helped me do more cross curricular studies with English. I am in fact creating my lesson for the course as a crosss curricular one studying The Tale of Genji.

For single subject teachers of English State Standard 3.0 opens a wide door for the study of Eastern literature and because of the curriculum for sventh grade history makes it hard not to do.

Medieval China, Japan, and Korea are of course imbedded in the seventh grade history standards and don't need any special modificatin to "bring in the far East".

GG