History Analysis: Change and Continuity over Time

This is our second analysis and writing project for our Columbian Exchange/Early Colonization Block for US History. In this exercise we are looking at different aspects of life that changed or stayed the same over early colonization. We began by writing different aspects out, and then we plotted them on a chart that had change as the x-axis and positivity/negativity on the y-axis. This is a modification of OER's Change and Continuity over Time exercise to be age and skill appropriate for middle school level. This exercise provided a wonderful amount of thinking and discussion. Sometimes it is not easy to decide how big of a change something was and if it were positive or negative overall.

After the activity, we did a short 'notice and wonder' discussion about the graph. We concluded that there were many impactful changes and most of those changes were negative. From this conclusion we will write an essay with this as our thesis. I have provided a template for our outline of the thesis. We will go over flushing out of the essay and our editing process (see Instagram high lights for Grammar and Language Arts.) This is the first formal introduction to the essay style writing, though we have been writing narrations for some time.

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