Some of the things we are learning as we attempt to create a solid core curriculum with a common theme, is one, the learning doesn't always have to be content, but also can be specific skills used in another class and two, while we all guard our time in our own content so closely, as you give up a little bit of time for another subject matter, the return is greater than the cost. Last week, Mike and I were rattling off several ideas at once and while Julie was receptive to the ideas, we could clearly tell she was outside of her comfort zone and struggling to see the specific connection to a particular sophomore course, World History. We assured her it would all work and she had buy in and was willing to try. This week, she put Dr. Hotz and I out of our comfort zones. She wanted to incorporate book studies into the 9th grade curriculum. We asked what her end result wanted to be at the end of 9th grade and what she wanted was for the 9th graders to be ready to go as a 10th grader in her course. After scaffolding the idea over 4 quarters we decided to start with an article together over watersheds, the content in science, and she and Ken would teach the structure. The questions at the end of the article were only slightly tweaked to use math and science words, like make predictions, to show the similarities in the English/History curriculum. The second quarter we are going to use advisory time to take the 9th graders to the library and learn how to research their own articles that we will use for credit in English and Science. The content for Science and the process for English and Math. Then hopefully 3rd and 4th they will be doing a larger article up to a book and the goal is to have a book ready to go over the summer for their first world history assignment starting in the fall. We are also looking at adding a half of credit geography class to the 9th grade GET curriculum in order to fully gel the core classes. Our hope is in 4 years we have a fully functioning SLC that fully utilizes the SLC and theme into all the core classes.