1/29/12

This week in History was a 4 day week because we had friday off. We started the week by being given a handout on which was Lincoln's second inaugural address. After reading through this worksheet, we answered the questions that followed it. One of Lincoln's major goals in this address was to have the south rejoin the union completely and he did this by showing in the address how the war transformed the nation. We were also asked to memorize a portion of the address that started with "With malice toward none" for a quiz which had been pushed back to tomorrow. I feel really confident for this quiz because i have this portion thouroughly memorized. One day this week we did have a substitute and we were given a worksheet to complete but we were not told that our books were needed to complete the work. Because I did not have my book during this class period I decided I would finish the worksheet when I got home but the worksheets were collected at the end of class. We finished up the short week by learning the interesting story of Lincoln's assasination.

We started out English this week by trading in our Adventures of Huckleberry Finn books for To Kill a Mockingbird books. To begin the lesson on this book, we made our cover pages and then worked on the To Kill a Mockingbird Anticipation Guide.We were also given vocabulary worksheets that contained some tricky words that show up in To Kill a Mockingbird. I started this book on Friday and have finished all of chapter 1. This book started our really slow and boring, but eventually I got into it and it started to seem better. So far it is about a girl and her older brother living in a neighbohood who meet a boy named Dill. In their neighborhood is a family with the last name Radley who are very mysterious and have a dark history. Dill becomes very fascinated in the Radley household and wants to lure Old man radley out of the house and eventually dares the older brother Jam to touch it.

One connection I made in English is that Scout and Jam's cook in To Kill a Mockingbird is named Calpurnia, which also happens to be the name of Julius Caesars wife, from the Play Julius Caesar we read earlier this year. A connection I made between History and English is that when Wilks killed Lincol, he beleived it would end the south's problems but really it ended up making them worse. I can connect this event to english because we learned a term called Situational Irony which is when the opposite of what is expacted happens. This applies to wilk's situation because the opposite of what he expected happened for the south.