Mission Impossible: Renaissance Style

I ended up taking the webquest assignment home with me last night.  I was really dragging my feet about planning this assignment.  I ate some dinner, read a book, and then finally forced myself to do it.  And you know what, it was kind of fun!  I just had to get past my bad preconceptions.


The webquest starts by introducing the challenge: crooks have invented a time machine and are traveling back to the Renaissance era to steal things that will be worth millions of dollars in today's world.  The 7th and 8th graders are spies being trained to travel back to this era to prevent the thefts.  They need to complete a "training manual" so they are prepared to blend in with the locals of Renaissance Europe.  The websites were in a document for them to click on, so all they had to do was read the information and fill in the blanks!  They had to do things like: research jobs available to each social class (which ones will the crooks most likely target?), find out what foods they will be eating and what clothes they'll be wearing to blend in, catch up on the pop culture of the time (popular musicians, writers, and playwrights), and just in case the crooks sneak on a boat, which Renaissance explorer are the thieves most likely to steal from? 


At first when they saw the note to bring their history books to class, the 7th and 8th graders groaned and complained.  But when they found out they could work together (and after they actually read what they were doing), the room grew quite while they worked on it.  One of the 7th grade girls said afterwards, "Miss H., I thoroughly enjoyed this.  It was really fun."  I think she was actually serious.  Only a few people finished today; I said they could work on it tomorrow along with their Mystery Class assignment.


Another thing that was supposed to be a success (but was more like a failure... or at least a lot more complicated than anticipated) was 5th grade tone chimes today.  I passed out a new song today, "America the Beautiful."  Unfortunately, I didn't check to see how high our tone chimes are.  Most of the melody line's notes were for tone chimes we didn't have.  Solution: transpose down an octave.  It's hard enough for me to wrap my brain around it... imagine four loud 5th graders trying to figure out what's going on!  We eventually got it figured out.  And it sounds pretty good!  I made them make extra notes on their music about which tone chimes they were actually playing (they are still playing the really high notes that are written; they're just using the ones an octave lower).  Also, they're having to play eighth notes and dotted quarter notes.  Yikes!  Mrs. M didn't teach them this last year!  Well, we muddled our way through it.  This song is getting to be a lot more complicated than I thought.