I humbly submit this as a very special edition of our Music Appreciation collection.  The kids will recognize the tune from Billy Joel's Honesty​.

What are your favorite memories of your fourth grade experience?

This would be the last of our HOGGATTEERS@HOME lesson sets, but I decided to add one.  That one, the 24th in the series, will put more of a closure on the Revolutionary era.  Meanwhile, Set 23 allows us a brief visit to the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Here is Lesson Set 23:

• creative writing
• historic characters:  John and Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and Harry Truman
• reading comprehension
• post-Revolutionary event:  first residents of the white house, the War of 1812, and the white house remodel
• letter writing
• mixed fractions and decimal numbers
• bonus content:  art, read aloud, and science

Our eighth video for the 2019/20 school year is available below.
​The fourth grade experience was cut short, but that doesn't keep us from looking back.

Here is the seventh video in our Once a Hoggatteer... series looking back at our 2019/20 school year:

We considered the possibility of a "sea monster" with the nickname Champy, in Lake Champlain who has eluded searchers for centuries.  I didn't see Champy when I took to the water there, last summer, but I also did not see anything like this.  Just because you've never seen something does not mean it does not exist.

So what do you think?  Would you throw it back?  Keep it to show people?  Mount it on the wall?  Eat it?

We're continuing our look back at the 2019/20 school year in Room 404.  Here is the sixth video:

As I will spend a week exploring and learning about colonial life in Virginia, I hope to get a pretty good understanding of Colonial Williamsburg during the Orientation Walk.

Another area that I am deficient in is that of the native lives who visited Williamsburg or lived nearby.  I need to learn more about the interactions that took place between the natives and the colonists.

It sounds as if the organizers of the institute plan to make us think deeply.  There are several opportunities to make decisions in court cases, witch trials, pirate captures, and alternative histories.  In the Introduction to Biography Lenses session, it sounds like I might have to put the ol' noggin to the test.

All of these things happen in one day, and there is even more.  It might be a little overwhelming, but that may also be why those in the know tell us that Colonial Williamsburg is Disneyland for history buffs.

The end of another school year is always bittersweet.  This year is more bitter than sweet, but looking back at some of our great times might help.  Here is the fifth installment:

When I was in middle school, junior high, and high school, my teachers wanted me to remember dates.  Historical dates.  International history.  State history.  Dates, dates, dates.  These were mostly dates that held no context, and they certainly didn't seem to have any relevance for me personally.  They were the kindling for tests, and they burned into smoke when the test was over.  Gone and forgotten.  It is probably easier for us to remember eras, approximations, and proximities than specific days, months, and years.

Dates of historical significance are often like that.  Memorizing them for a test means nothing to us.  But there are dates that live in our memories because of how they occurred during our lifetimes, because of the personal impacts we felt or shared.

It happened 25 years ago, in Oklahoma City, a month before I moved to Joplin, Missouri.  I shall never forget.

We remember dates.  We remember events.  All of us have moments when we remember where we are when a certain thing happened.  For me, those events go something like this:
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• July 20, 1969:  I know I was watching television in my living room.  The image was blurry and in black-and-white. Walter Cronkite narrated as man stepped onto the moon for the first time.  My fourth birthday was still a month away.

 

• August 16, 1977:  I was in the back seat of the family car, just 9 days from my 12th birthday.  We approached a traffic light near the DeVille shopping center in Oklahoma City when a person announced on the CB radio that Elvis Presley was dead.

 

• March 30, 1981:  It was my sophomore of high school in Tuttle, Oklahoma.  I was in Mr. Dan Kennedy's writing class at the end of the hall  when the news came over the radio that President Ronald Reagan had been shot.

 

• January 28, 1986:  I was student-teaching in a speech classroom at Yukon (Oklahoma) High School.  One of the girls returned from using the restroom to inform the class that the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after taking off.  My dad was laid off of his job on the same day.

 

• September 11, 2001:  I dropped off my fourth graders at Music and passed through the office at Cecil Floyd Elementary in Joplin.  A parent came to the counter to ask the secretaries if we had seen the news of planes hitting the Trade Center Towers in New York City.  My wife lost her job on the same day.

This list really highlights the news of the day.  These events are all ones that I could read about, listen to, and watch through media outlets.  But the real events that are closer to me are the ones I could walk outside my door to see.  Obviously, one of those events occurred on May 22, 2011, when we walked out the door and saw the devastation an EF5 tornado that destroyed much of Joplin and took the lives of our friends and neighbors.  

The first of our huge, dated, walk-out-the-door, personal experiences for me (outside of marriage and baby births) happened 25 years ago today:  April 19, 1995.  At 9:02 a.m., as I was giving a spelling test to my class of second graders some five miles away, domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb exploded in downtown Oklahoma City.  I heard the boom.  I felt the shockwave.  None of us knew what it was.

As the lead teacher at Buchanan Elementary, I was responsible for the safety of students and staff.  Shortly after the blast, I delegated a parent to watch my students as I locked the school doors and counseled the staff.  With only one television (located in the library), information was sketchy.  I stood at the front door and let parents in when they wanted to hug their children or check them out of school for the rest of the day.

One of my students, SAMANTHA, attended a few of the memorials in the coming weeks as we ended our school year, and our class dealt with the subject honestly and openly in the remaining days.  Oklahoma City was rocked to the core.  But just as Joplin experienced following the 2011 tornado, people stepped up.  One evil act triggered countless good deeds and innumerable prayers.

While we're waiting for birds to mature and lizards to do whatever lizards do, why not tackle the lesson sets in the HOGGATTEERS@HOME lesson collection?  The 19th lesson set is now available, and it is an important one.  Not only is this the last episode of Liberty's Kids, but it is also the point at which we establish the United States government.  We'll also explore a little more about the then-future president, James Madison, and his wife Dolley.  Here are the things we cover in Set 19:
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• Revolutionary events:  the Philadelphia Convention and the War of 1812
• checks and balances
• three branches of government:  legislative, executive, and judicial
• two Revolutionary characters:  James and Dolley Madison
• ​reading comprehension
• using metric measurements and area models to represent tenths greater than one
• bonus content:  read aloud, science, and art

Lesson Set 20 follows, as well, with a bit of information about another of our founders, Dr. Benjamin Rush:
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• a Revolutionary character:  Dr. Benjamin Rush
• medical approach during the Revolution:  bloodletting
• yellow fever and response to pandemic
• modern psychiatry
• reading comprehension
• reading fluency
• representing mixed numbers using place value, number lines, and expanded form
• bonus content:  ​art, read aloud, and science

And finally, with Lesson Set 21, we lay our first president to rest:

• Revolutionary characters:  George and Martha Washington, Dr. James Craik, Tobias Lear, Henry Lee, and others
• a post-Revolutionary event:  George Washington's funeral
• using meters to represent hundredths
• bonus content:  read aloud, science, and art

We're in the process of looking back at our 2019/20 school year.  Here is our fourth video installment:

With the completion of Lesson Set 18 on our HOGGATTEERS@HOME site, I have only five lesson sets remaining in the planned lesson collection.  This one, centered around Shays' Rebellion, is not my favorite, as it depicts poverty and loneliness (Are those timely topics, or what?).  Still, it may help to see that these subjects are not new or unique to us in our current situation; neither is sickness and depression, by the way.  It is something that has been faced before, and the relief comes in that people and nations survived regardless.