The Rest of the Bill of Rights - Class Recap

Rays of the sun streaming through the flag of the United States, over the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Picture taken in 2011.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to your long weekend! Not so long for me, because I will be at school all day on Friday, but I am sure everyone will enjoy  Here's the recap for the day:

Learning Targets Addressed:
SS.HS.KN.ALT.05: I can demonstrate an understanding of the principles, structures, and functions of different levels of U.S. government.
SS.HS.CO.ALT.05: I can communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing.

Soundtrack: “99 Problems (Clean)" by Jay Z. Selected for today because it discusses the various protections that the Bill of Rights offers. Lyrics (which are decidedly NOT clean, but Rap Genius does offer some interesting interpretations of what they mean) here.

AGENDA 10/9/14:
News Brief - Logan
Political Spectrum
Rights of the Accused
The Death Penalty

Homework: Read the blog! Study for upcoming Constitution test. Next news brief: Tifani.

News Brief: Logan did not have a news brief ready today and will need to make it up. Instead, we had a good class discussion about Ebola and how worried we should be about it. I showed this tweet from the White House, which talks about how someone gets the virus. All in all, it was a good discussion. Thanks! Tifani was selected to do the next news brief.

Political Spectrum: This was leftover from last class, so we finished it up. Basically, I wanted everyone to have some foundation for knowledge about the different political philosophies we are going to be talking about this semester. If you missed it, the PowerPoint is here:

Google Drive - Political Spectrum PowerPoint 

Rights of the Accused: Because I want to get done with the Bill of Rights, today we looked through the details of the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments. Specifically, I started by looking at the cleaned up lyrics to "99 Problems" by Jay Z, then going through a packet of individual U.S. Supreme Court cases that helped set the scope of the Fourth Amendment. That packet is here:

Google Drive - Fourth Amendment Protections Handout

We went over some case studies and had some more good discussion about various student questions:

Then, I showed this clip to introduce the Fifth Amendment:

This led to another handout, going through the rights of the accused in the United States. We finished the first page of in class (get ahead of the game by reviewing it all as homework):

Google Drive - Rights of the Accused Handout

Next class, on Tuesday, we will finish up with this and really start preparing for the Constitution test, which will probably be on Thursday. Have a great weekend!