Hi! I feel like there’s a change, a lightness. I am grateful that we have made it this far! In school, we’ve been learning how to write an IDM by looking at sources, looking for patterns and interesting points, putting those points into categories, writing a claim, and then supporting the claim with evidence. We did really well completing a scaffolded IDM about one of the students’ home countries. We invited a teacher from that country to class and he enriched our understanding of how geography impacts agriculture, defense, and politics. But now, it’s time to apply what we learned about how to write an IDM as well as our history knowledge to complete the official IDM for this quarter. We will do a quick sentence strip sorting activity about the geography of our city to remind ourselves how we structure a five-paragraph essay. And then, it’s time to get on the horse and go! I pray for courage and determination. Sometimes, we get overwhelmed by the English, and by the structure, and by the sheer magnitude of what we have to do as part of writing. But I pray that we will forge ahead, fill out the graphic organizer, and write about what we have learned from class and most importantly, from our sources, so that our work will not be according to ChatGPT, but according to the documents we have in front of us! May we all be brave today and do hard things!