Thank you, Rabbi Oratz!

Donuts upon your arrival help to make an icy commute better...

Welcome to Elizabethan England!

With the completion of their English research papers, eighth-graders reached another milestone in their last year as middle school students.  Way to go!! Students spent a month gathering sources, taking notes, and synthesizing research on a topic related to Elizabethan England.  During the process, they refined their writing skills while following the MLA format for citing the research. Just to give you a glimpse, I've listed some of the creative titles of their research papers:

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger: The Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (by Noa C.)

Killer on the Loose: The Black Plague in Elizabethan England (Chloe N.)

The Tower of Terror: The History Behind the Tower of London (by Lauren B.)

Triple E: Elizabeth Evolves England (Yonathan M.)

The Queen Who Really Lost Her Head: The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots (Hannah R.)

Elizabeth I: The Queen of Hearts (Celia W.)

Once students submitted the paper, they used the Perfect Captions app to create, display, and share some of the information they learned from their research.  See examples below:

               

Care to solve a riddle?

In Ursula LeGuin's fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea, characters are tasked with solving riddles.  As part of this unit, students followed in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of writing and sharing riddles.  Each riddle needed to describe an ordinary object or something from nature.  Moreover, students needed to include a kenning.  Up for a challenge?  See if you can solve the riddles below.

 Meira and Hailey's riddle: (click on picture to enlarge)

Jason and Josh F.'s riddle: