A Civil War... Scavenger Hunt?

After having nearly completed this blog post, it entirely disappeared, so this is a recreation of the original, a cheap counterfeit of a masterpiece, a second rate imitation of a brilliant piece of writing. My apologies.
To continue our study of the civil war, we held a scavenger hunt. This scavenger hunt brought us through all the major battles of the civil war. The essential questions that would be answered in this hunt were "Who was the ultimate victor in each of the theaters of war: East, West, Naval?" and "What are some commonalities you can identify in the reasons for the results of the battles?" First, each student picked a battle based on a description. We then did some background research to find the name of the battle, and then went into depth. We discovered the victor, dates, location, and theatre of the battle, as well as some details. We then put this information into a Google Doc, and created a QR code and bit.ly link, which they printed out. This is where it gets scavengery. Each battle had a number (I was 16). The students hid their printed QR codes around the school, and told the student with the number below theirs where they hid it, and were in turn given similar information about the battle with the number after theirs. The location of the next battle in the school was placed into the Google Doc alongside the information about the battle, so students could travel from station to station, being told where to go next and copying historical information into Evernote. Much running around the school ensued. 
To answer the essential question, we got back together as a class with our newly compiled knowledge. We each posted our ideas about who dominated each theater to our Padlet.  The class seemed to be in agreement: The Union dominated the western theater, the Confederacy dominated early battles in the eastern theater before the Union fully readied their army and strategies, and finally, the Union dominated naval battles. Some commonalities in reasons for success were the facts that the Union had more resources and troops, but the Confederacy was initially more organized, although this would soon shift, paving the way for a Union victory. 

Election of 1860

The controversial election of 1860 showed the deep divide in America as the Civil war was brewing.  The essential question presented to us was: How were the results of the  Election of 1860 representative of the deep divisions  over slavery? In class, we watched a Crash Course video regarding the Election of 1860, and briefly studied the outcome. In this diagram, we see the outcome of the election based on votes from each state.

As you can see, the northern and western states electorally voted for Abraham Lincoln, an abolitionist, while the south's electoral votes went to Breckenridge, who favored slavery. Stephen Douglas, who won the electoral college only in Missouri, was a proponent of popular sovereignty, which encouraged the citizens of a state to decide whether or not it would be a free state or a slave state. While it makes sense that each candidate would win in the states that they did, the south thought it was unfair that Lincoln won the elections, as he wasn't even on their ballots. How could a man that they didn't know existed become president of the United States? More information about the election and surrounding events can be found in the video below. We then looked at The Civil War in Art to provide images of art from that time period to put into our mini-documentary, below. The art work ranges from portraits to abstract images of the sky, and all fo ti helped to show how the election of 1860 showed the deep divisions slavery had cut into the nation, splitting it into Civil War.