September 8, 2015

You took your first quiz today.  The average across all four classes of APUSH this semester was around 75% with the stimulus based questions pulling the worst of the performance.  We will be targeting that type of assessment throughout the semester as EVERY multiple choice question on the APUSH exam is stimulus based.  We also discussed the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening today and examined some documents related to both.  We finished the class discussing historical writing, specifically focusing on crafting a thesis statement.   We identified the following five steps:

1. Identify the time period of the question/topic
2. Identify the skill the question is assessing (Comparison, Causation, Periodization, or Continuity and Change)
3. Identify the Main Idea of the question
4. Brainstorm as many pieces of Specific Factual Information related to the topic as you can recall
5. Develop three related categories into which you can easily group the majority of important SFI's

Tonight's homework is to do all of the above pre-writing and then write a rough draft thesis statement on the following question:

• To what extent and in what ways did European powers develop different patterns of colonization in North America? Support your answer with specific and relevant historical information from the period 1607 to 1754.
  

Don't forget your Colonies maps are also due tomorrow... I might look back over them if I were you...

H