Introduction

Introduction:

My name is Mike Albiniak, history teacher at Naperville Central High School for the last 16 years.  I teach a variety of subjects including: 20th Century History, Military History, Decades, Ancient History, and U.S. History.  Of those classes, U.S. History has been the one that I have taught the longest; 15 years including 14 summers.  During my second year teaching U.S. History, I took a major risk and decided to play a Civil War Simulation that a colleague of mine found in a "Simulation" book.  The risk payed off as the students instantly became engaged in the material in a way I hadn't seen up to that point.  It was then that I decided that this simulation is something that I would do every year.  As good as the simulation was it did, however, have some flaws.  Therefore, for the past 14 years I have been adapting, tweaking, subtracting, and adding things to make it as realistic a simulation as I can.  The purpose of this blog is to share what I have created, connect with other history teachers who may be interested in trying this simulation, and to hear suggestions from other teachers about things that can make the game even more accurate.  I will be posting a series of blogs, each of which will examine a specific component of the simulation which will include:  the classroom set-up, teams and game board set up, day 1 walk-through, rules, game play walk-through, and assessment.  Obviously, everything that I discuss in these blogs is only the way I do it and all of it can be altered or modified to fit the needs of the individual teacher. Since I use a Smartboard to play the simulation I will be referring to that often.  Many teachers many not have access to a Smartboard.  In which case, they may need to invent alternative methods to play the simulation.