“The whole people of the US, in Order to start a good, united nation, establish fairness, make sure our country has peace, provide for the nation’s defense system, make to prosper the nation’s well being, and secure the gifts of freedom to us and our children, do order and lay the foundation for this Constitution for the United States of America.”

When you don't know what other facts you can gather, ask yourself if you have:

• What's interesting
  
• What's important
  
• Who is involved
  
• When it happened
  
• Where it happened
  
• Why it happened
  
• How it happened

For example, if you are writing a paragraph about the events leading up to the winter at Valley Forge or the Battle at Yorktown, you might ask yourself, "Why did General Washington choose Valley Forge?  Where there other options?  Was there something attractive about Valley Forge?"

For Yorktown, ask yourself why the army was moving to Yorktown.  Did they have to go there?  Were they choosing to go there?  What was different about Yorktown than all the other places in the colonies?

Check out this video from Common Craft on how to find what you want on the internet efficiently.

Here are some search tips:

• Search with keywords, not questions.
  
• Imagine what words will be on the site you would like to find.
  
• You probably want to ignore the advertised sites at the top.  They paid to be there.
• Words like of, the, a, and in are usually left out of your query.
  
• Use quotation marks to search for phrases.  For example, searching for sand sharks will look for those two words in any order in any places on a website, but "sand sharks" searches for that exact phrase in that exact order any place on a website.
  
• Sort your Google search results by reading level.
• Use a search engine that automatically gives you reliable results like Sweet Search.

1.  In which early colony would you feel most at home?  Please provide at least three specific reasons based on facts from the text.

2.  The House of Burgesses was the first example of representative government in the colonies.  How does representative government work?

Here (hopefully) is a link to a folder that contains overviews of all the major colonies.

It was made by last year's class and contains some extra material (on WWII) that isn't necessary for you, but I thought sharing it would be better than not.

Hopefully, you knew we had a history test on Tuesday.  What you may not have heard is how well your child did on that test.  My estimate is that out of 38 questions most students missed between 10 and 13 questions, and while I didn't hear a word about what they thought about this at school, I imagine some of you may have had some strong reactions at home.  

Without actually seeing those reactions or even hearing specifics, my guess is that most of them are pretty well founded.  It was a very difficult test over a wide number of facts.  Also, a number of the questions on the test were testing knowledge of what were, in my opinion, less significant facts in the larger scope of Canadian history.

All that to say, the test proved to be unfair, so I took the top scores and made them the new total points possible.  If you look on Sycamore you will see the test is graded out of a total of 31 points now.

Please feel free to email or stop in with any questions.