Analyzing documents

World History

          In the 7th grade, I have gotten more skilled at analyzing data, while RAHA-ing them (Reading Annotating, Highlighting, and Answering), and can completely understand them. The purpose of this reflection is to show my growth in World History, and to show all the activities or worksheets we did to show this growth. We did a lot of fun activities, but these are two of them that really show my growth.

          In World History, I have become a skilled data analyzer. By being a skilled analyzer, I mean that I have been able to understand it better in a shorter amount of time. I can easily answer the questions given because I RAHA the important parts of the passage. I could write down any questions, as annotations, to be answered later on. In world history, you have to highlight some important dates, names, and places. Things like the Ides of March, which we did a RAHA on. I have gotten really good at RAHA, because we did it in activities, notes, and worksheets. This also helped me in Science, where we do RAHA too. We did this in every unit, but I am going to talk about the Rome unit. The main part that I grew in was actually being able to interpret ideas that usually are not directly stated. I have to read between the lines. I have been able to read and interpret like a historian.

          The first artifact I am going to share with you is the ‘Reading like a historian’ worksheets. We did these worksheets to learn more about Rome. These were primary and secondary documents, primary meaning that they were written at the time at which the event described happened, and secondary meaning it was written after the event described happened, and it was based on sources and inferring. Our teacher gave us these worksheets and we were instructed to RAHA them. Then, he gave us the questions that went with the reading. The questions asked us about the sources, the author, and some questions about the content so that we completely understood the information. When we were done with them, we could use them to study for tests. These documents were made by another company, but we had to fill them out, and asked for our opinion on the subject. A concept from this documents is “The fall of Rome”. The fall of Rome happened because there were too many wars going on and not enough money left to stop them. Barbarians eventually took over Rome. On the documents, you can see that it has the sources, the author, and some vocabulary words. This helps in seeing what point of view this document was written from. We could see it in two or three different points of views, and then we would later discuss both the points of views. One time we did that was when we discussed what specific reason Rome fell. We came into conclusion that the top cause was Invasions.

          The second Artifact I am going to share with you is the newspaper we made and the notes we took from the Newspaper Project. In the project, we first started by analyzing actual newspapers. We did this so that we had an idea of what good newspapers look like, and how to make them professional looking newspapers. First we looked at all the components of the newspaper. We learned a ton of terms from this. Terms like masthead, which is the title of the newspaper, the headline (the title of the article), byline (the line designated for authors name), and many more. After looking at newspapers, we looked at their articles, and how they were written. All of them had the same thing except for the headline, byline, and content. In the end, we wrote our own article about Rome, and worked as a class to compose a newspaper. As a result of this, some artifacts we created were notes about the components of a newspaper. Another thing we produced was an actual newspaper.  Analyzation is when you look at things and try to understand in depth what they are saying. They might be vague but you have to read between the lines and figure it out. I grew in analyzation from the newspaper project because I learned to look at other people’s work, then learn something from it, and try to incorporate it into your work. The actual newspapers we analyzed were created by the Dayton Daily News staff. We were able to get some feedback from the Dayton Daily staff. It didn’t seem that the project required analyzation, but there was analyzation in everything we did. If you put the two newspapers (the one we made and the Dayton Daily News), you can see that things like the layout, and the content of the newspapers are the same. They both have different jump pages, weather news, etc. We actually interviewed the Dayton Daily staff to ask about what they wanted to know about Rome.

          All the artifacts show my growth in these areas. They are evidence that I grew in RAHA and Analyzing documents. This is useful for me because we will do even more RAHA next year, and I have to be prepared. These were just baby steps to learning to RAHA. Next year, we will be more self - dependent, and we have to explore more. We will be asked to learn some things on our own, and this is preparing me to better understand things that are given to me. In life, I will have to use analyzation because to learn something, you need to look at an example of somebody doing it to understand it better. At school, we looked at the newspapers as a way to take some inspiration from them and make a newspaper of our own. Along with learning the skills, I gained a lot of knowledge from them about Rome.