Almost time to end the year -- with a flipping bang!

     We still have almost 4 weeks left to go until the students' last day on June 24th. Many colleagues and friends in Georgia, Colorado, and elsewhere are ending their school year in May, but I still have 15 more teaching days (not including 8th grade graduation ceremony & rehearsal, the theme park field trip, and Step-Up Day).  Worst of all, they already had their year-end trip (3 days in New York City) before Memorial Day, so academics were interrupted for a week. Who wants to do school for another month?!

      So for the 3rd year, I'm ending the year with a TLAP-style Civil War unit. This was inspired by the Interact Simulations "Civil War" booklet, but we ditched some elements and revised some others for a flipping awesome ending to the year.

       Every student wears a badge with the name of a real-life Civil War soldier. Half of them represent men from a unit that mustered in our school's city: Newton Massachusetts. The other names match a regiment that enlisted near Newton Alabama. (Yeah, this took a long time to research, but I will definitely recycle this unit in future years!) So we have "Union soldiers" and "Confederate soldiers," but in class I avoid substantive conflict between the students' characters. The Alabama kids will never be asked to support slavery, and I discourage any attempts to speak with a Southern drawl.
      At first, each student's character has the rank of "Private." (I am and always shall be a Lieutenant General.) One of my secondary learning objectives is military rank hierarchy -- an area of general knowledge.  I also need to keep them engaged on these warm June days!  So they are always working for promotion to a higher rank:

       The "Combat Cards" that were mentioned in the Promotion Checklist is a simple card game like War, except instead of aces and jacks they have military term like musket and mortar, or platoon and brigade.* Students get to play several times a week, and the faster they learn the values of each term, the faster they play the game, and the more quickly they can win cards!  I will also have them work in small groups sometimes to quiz other groups on Civil War knowledge; that's how they gain Morale Points.

       Also, the promotions help to power the flipping element of the Civil War unit. There are three sets of essential understandings that I expect all students to gain:

• describe several causes of the war (not just slavery!)
• disprove several myths about the war (like "Lincoln freed all the slaves")
• explain how 5 events were turning points (including Gettysburg and Sherman's March)

That is what the videos are for. These will be my last 3 assessments of the year, and I will use the same system of quizzes and retakes for accountability (related post). The one little twist is that I'm going to try asynchronous flipping:  Students can take the quiz whenever they feel ready -- no assigned due-dates. I plan to provide 15-20 minutes of quiet time every class period for students to take an assessment OR prepare for their next quiz OR for independent research.  I trust that the desire for rank promotion will spur many students forward.  If this is a terrible disaster then I can assign official quiz dates for the last week of school, but I really want to give it a shot.  
        I will keep you posted!

* The Combat Cards come directly from the Interact Simulations "Civil War" unit, so I must give full credit to its authors.