A Message to 6th Grade Students

Dear incoming 6th graders,

We are 8th graders at DeWitt Middle School. We have successfully completed two years here at DeWitt. We want to welcome you to DeWitt, and to give you some advice to help you be successful and happy for the next three years.

Cyberbullying

Tyler Clementi and Dharun Ravi had everything to look forward to. They had been accepted into a beautiful and prestigious university. When they graduated, they would have high paying jobs in a career of their choice. But one choice, one event, changed everything. One would die, the other go to prison. After reading the article on Edmodo, write a brief paragraph, using a topic and concluding sentence, that tells us what lesson we might learn from this experience.

School Uniform Debate

The arguments over the issue of school uniforms have been going on for several decades. There are many people who say that school uniforms vastly improve the school environment both behaviorally and academically. There are others who believe this is not true, and that uniforms are an additional burden on families. Your job is to research this topic, and write a well-crafted paragraph(s) with specific details supporting your group's decision about school uniforms. Be sure you have a topic and concluding sentence, you check for grammar and spelling, use specific facts and details to support your decision, and create a works cited page. Post your final decision below as a comment.

CLUE FIVE

You and your group members need to work together to figure out the answer to the riddle below. You are not allowed to "meet and talk" in person, you need to use an online collaborate tool.  You can communicate through Edmodo, through email, through a Google doc, through comments on this blog, through Diigo, or any other appropriate collaborative tool.  Your job is to talk together, research, share ideas and thoughts digitally to come up with answer to this riddle. 
 

Clue Five: Which?

Your teammates should be coming up with details of a specific object. You are to provide the final detail that will help your group figure out which specific object you are looking for. Read the clues below.

• The offspring of parents are called _______________________.
• Activities to keep young children playing are called _________________________.
• There are over 200 of these in this object.
• There are over 80 activities in this object.
• This is played in a spacious area, such as outdoors or in a large room, in which one player, designated as "It", is blindfolded and gropes around attempting to touch the other players without being able to see them, while the other players scatter and try to avoid the person who is "it", hiding in plain sight and sometimes teasing them to make them change direction. What is it? _______________________________
• Two teams of about equal strength pull against each other with a rope until one team pulls the opposite team across a line. What is it? _______________________

CLUE FOUR

You and your group members need to work together to figure out the answer to the riddle below. You are not allowed to "meet and talk" in person, you need to use an online collaborate tool.  You can communicate through Edmodo, through email, through a Google doc, through comments on this blog, through Diigo, or any other appropriate collaborative tool.  Your job is to talk together, research, share ideas and thoughts digitally to come up with answer to this riddle. 

Clue Four: WHO?

Read the clues below. Decide who they are referring to.

Ten years before he died, he stopped using the letter “h” his name.

He would often dress up as a peasant so he could sneak into peasant celebrations to sketch and get ideas.

He married the daughter of the man he was apprenticed to.

He rejected the Italianate Style of his time, for a simpler style.

Thanks to him we have a detailed picture of life in 16^th century Europe.

One of his famous works was based on a scripture taken from the New Testatment: Matthew 15:13-14 and Luke 6:39-40

CLUE THREE

You and your group members need to work together to figure out the answer to the riddle below. You are not allowed to "meet and talk" in person, you need to use an online collaborate tool.  You can communicate through Edmodo, through email, through a Google doc, through comments on this blog, through Diigo, or any other appropriate collaborative tool.  Your job is to talk together, research, share ideas and thoughts digitally to come up with answer to this riddle. 

Clue Three: WHEN?

Read the clues below. What do all these clues have in common?

Historians call this period the “rise of the West”.

Spain and Portugal explored the seas and opened up trade.

Copernicus proposes a “sun centric” universe.

The Catholic church was being assailed by the Protestant Reformation.

Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe.

Tintoretto, Andrea Amati, Christopher Marlowe, Gerardus Mercator

CLUE TWO

You and your group members need to work together to figure out the answer to the riddle below. You are not allowed to "meet and talk" in person, you need to use an online collaborate tool.  You can communicate through Edmodo, through email, through a Google doc, through comments on this blog, through Diigo, or any other appropriate collaborative tool.  Your job is to talk together, research, share ideas and thoughts digitally to come up with answer to this riddle. 

Clue Two: WHAT?

Read the information below. Figure out what it is describing.

This depicts aspects of everyday life. Usually no particular or known person(s) is used, just commonplace, anonymous figures. It flourished in Northern Europe in the 1500s.

Usually it included scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, home scenes, inn scenes, and street scenes. They might be realistic or imagined, or romanticized.

Most commonly during this time period, they were done with oil.