My first attempt at Solo Taxonomy For my first attempt I was not confident about the students ability to be able to categorise causes based on themes. This was where I started. AFter a short discussion about Wars and how they begin, the students came up with accurate definitions of what our four key themes were; economic, social, political and religious. STudents wrote these definitions onto their hexagons and began to tesselate their hexagons based on whether the causes on their cards were economic, social, political or religious. Students were very much engaged in this task ocassionally disagreeing with their group members about where the card/hexagon belonged.

This was the students first attempt. I then asked the students to peer assess each others hexagon creations and talk about any disagreement they had over the causes, again this led to a lengthy discussion. A number of students chose to modify their diagrams as a result of this discussion.

The lesson ended with a plenary asking the studnets to make a judgement about which was the most important cause of the Civil War using Think Pair Share. Studnets will be using this as a basis for their assessment lesson when they will be completing a piece of extended writing about the most important cause of the Civil War.