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Camp Internet California Backcountry Teachers Briefing
January 31 - February 4, 2000
Passport Update
This week is a transition into a new section for each of the History, Reading, and Science tracks. Your students can now access all Passport materials required to complete section one - Native Americans, and section three - Earth Sciences. As soon as they have completed those sections, please reward them with their Passports Stamps. In section two, they have resources to answer 1-6, and 7-9 will be covered in the next four weeks. Also in the next four weeks the answers to all of section four will be made available; currently they should be able to find answers to 1-4.
Frog Jumping
If for any reason your school has not received its Mark Twain book, please let us know. May the Frog Jumping begin ! Lake Arrowhead School has offered an interesting suggestion : first they will read the story as written, then they are inviting a French-speaking parent to come in for an in-class demonstration of what an excerpt of the translation sounds like, and then will read Mark Twain's return of the French to English.
From the Gold Rush to The Iron Rush - Building the Pacific Railroad
As soon as your class wraps up their Gold Rush studies, they can turn their attention to the next major historical event in California - the building of the transcontinental railroad, 1860-1869. In this new section they will learn about the vision, determination, political leveraging, and immigrant laborers who carved a railroad through the California Backcountry. They will see how the Big Four got involved and became millionaire tycoons, and that the media referred to their behavior as being as ruthless as crocodiles.
The following section will turn attention to the flowering of the arts in California 1860-1910, and will give you a chance to learn about the Bohemian Club of San Francisco and their backcountry activities, as well as what we call the Adventurers Club that included artists, scientists, and writers - Like John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Joseph Le Conte, who spent the best days of their lives hiking, exploring, and recording their impressions of the California Backcountry.
In the reading section we turn our attention to Robert Louis Stevenson, the love story that brought him to California (a great Valentines Day story ), and the writings he undertook while in the state for a year that changed his life. RLS was an honorary member of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, and spent his honeymoon in a tumbling down miners shack on a mountain in Sonoma.
These are all new units to the Camp, and illustrations will be added during February, plus new quizzes and learning activities. We will announce the interactive projects as they go online.
California Plant Communities
The first few weeks of this section will be focused on learning the concepts and words that are used to describe biotic communities. The world's biomes are Aquatic, Desert, Forest, Grassland, and Tundra. California is home to all of these. We will then learn about the sub divisions of forest types, desert characteristics, and coastal and aquatic realms of plant life.
Once they have gone over the introductory materials, we will later be inviting the students to participate in online Virtual Field Trips. They will be able to imagine themselves on expeditions to explore the plant life of the Sierras, the Mojave, in the Giant Sequoias, at a Desert Oasis, among the Coast Redwoods, and out on the Channel Islands.
Mark your Calendars for CUE
The Computer Using Educators (CUE) non-profit organization host two teacher conferences a year. In the spring, May 11-13, the conference will be in Palm Springs. Janice Ross of Lake Arrowhead School has been invited to lead a session on Camp Internet, and will be joined by fellow Outpost Leaders Laurey Meier, Ken Decroo, and Cheryl Perez. They will present a Camp program over view, demonstrate their own innovative applications of the program in the classroom, and feature student work. We hope to see you there !
We will be sending you materials to help get the word out to fellow teachers and to invite them to attend the session on Saturday May 13th, 11:30am. If you would like to learn more about CUE, go to www.cue.org. The Camp has become a Bronze CUE Sponsor, and will soon be a link from their Sponsor web page. Watch for us in the CUE newsletter too.
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