Philosophy of Government, Day 1 - Class Recap

The ball of yarn that we used in class today for the Class Unity Activity! Thanks for participating in this!

Dear class,

I enjoyed getting to know you all a bit better today! We had a productive time with the yarn activity and learning more about the philosophy of government. Here's what happened in class today:

Learning Targets Addressed: 

Knowledge LT 2: I can demonstrate an understanding of the role of governments in current issues.
Knowledge LT 4: I can explain how different ideological movements and philosophies shape politics.

Soundtrack: "Comin' From Where I'm From" by Anthony Hamilton. Because today, we talked about where we are from and how we got to be at Westview, via our family background. Lyrics here.

AGENDA 2/15/17:
News Brief - Alyssa
Citizenship Scores
Class Unity Activity
Philosophy

Homework: Read the blog and post a comment (if you have not already). Ethan has the next news brief.

News Brief: Alyssa had the news brief today and selected an article about this story to talk about: CNN.com - Trump to begin renegotiating NAFTA with leaders of Mexico, Canada. We discussed this story and what the different parts of the issues are (especially with different trade agreements and campaign issues in the last elections). Alyssa did a fantastic job of knowing about the story and demonstrating how to do a news brief! Thanks, Alyssa!

Ethan was assigned to do the next news brief.

Citizenship: To start looking at our government, I played this video of high school students trying to answer questions about social studies:

We laughed at some of the responses, then I flipped the script and had the class try and citizenship test!

Here was the pre-test that I passed out in class. All sorts of good questions about how the U.S. government is structured and works.

Google Drive: United States Government Citizenship Test

Thanks for your focus and participation on this! I enjoyed going through the answers with everyone in class, as we learned a little more about the basics of the United States government.

Class Unity Activity: I always love this, for many reasons. One, because I love hearing about how everyone came to be in our classroom. Two, because of how the yarn connects us all. Three, because it helps the class (and me) learn names and a little about each other! Thank you for participating in this. It can get lengthy, I know, but I value it so much more than just lecturing for that time.

Philosophy: To begin this part of class, we watched this Crash Course video (with the captions on - it's pretty speedy!) about why studying government is important:

After this, I wanted to start looking at some of the philosophers of government during the Enlightenment period. Here's the PowerPoint we went through (we only did slides 6-8 today - just focus on those for now):

Google Drive: Philosophers of Government PowerPoint

Again, please review and be responsible for knowing the basics of what Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu thought about government.

That was it for the day! Thanks again - see you next class!