It's Common Sense!

On Friday I felt like I hit a home run. It was the first dance of the year AND the new Hunger Games movie was coming out. It was the perfect storm of distractions for the students. Oh and did I mention that our first vacation is next week? Yes, it was one of those Friday's teachers dread.

But, we were going to be working with primary sources, analyzing and using text as evidence to support our claims. However, with the insight of master teacher Phoebe Slater, we turned this into a highly engaging inquiry based role playing lesson.

We have been reading the book My Brother Sam is Dead by James and Christopher Collier. In the book a family from Redding Connecticut is  being torn apart by the Revolutionary War. The son who is living in New Haven leaves his family to join the Continental Army to the dismay of his loyalist father.

We used this as the spring board to set up the lesson. Jordy, my teaching partner and myself split the class into two groups, we have the loyalists from Redding Connecticut and the rebels from New Haven who are all receiving shipments of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" pamphlet and the citizens are getting fired up. The loyalist are calling treason against Thomas Paine and are ready to go to New Haven to set the record strait. The people of New Haven are using this as a reason to fight and are gathering fellow rebels, organizing and storming into loyalist towns to take their weapons in preparations of the fight. 

The two towns (groups) were given excerpts of the text to use to find evidence to persuade the other town when they meet each other at the markets and to use the text to start protests. We are using the "Teaching Democracy" framework to help facilitate this inquiry the students are working on.  Let's just say the students were so excited and were so engaged in the text trying to start the revolution. The rebels have even started making hats to wear as they protest!