Great Friday!

Hi Everyone!

I was SO excited to share this story with you guys, I can't believe it's taken me all weekend to finally get a moment to sit down and share it.  I had the absolutely BEST class with my honors class on Friday; it was truly the first time this whole year that I've been excited and completely satisfied with how a lesson went.

We just started doing work with The Tempest, and Friday was our last day of pre-unit learning before diving into the text.  My co-ops had originally been covering Shakespearean language in the lesson, but I wanted to spice it up a little bit with one of my favorite lessons from Shakespeare that I remember from high school.  The lesson started by having my kids write a silent conversation with a neighbor.  We transitioned the lesson into a quick overview of the language: the "thee" "thou" "thy" stuff, along with looking at verb forms (adding -est and -st to common verbs we use today). I also let them watch the ghost scene from the Kenneth Branaugh version of Hamlet so they could hear the language being used, too. I then gave the students a list of over 200 Shakespearean common and odd words and asked them to go back to their conversations and try their best to translate them using Shakespearean words.  I really didn't expect it to be such a hit.  They obviously loved reading the funny-sounding words.  Finally, I let them have a little crazy-fun and hit them with my favorite activity: Shakespearean insults.  I told them how it worked, and then spat one at one of my students.  I let all the kids yell insults at me for a while and then spend the last five minutes of class yelling insults at one another.  They LOVED it and it was so nice to see a class get so active at 8:30 in the morning.

I rode that teaching high for the rest of the day and had a wonderful Friday :)  I was just so excited to see 7th graders engaging in Shakespeare, and I hope it was a good set up for the rest of the unit to get them excited about reading.  I also started doing "Shakespearean Scholars" of the day, which is where I post names of the students who did particularly outstanding in class the day before on the white board, which i'm hoping works as a motivation tool.  Also, since they clearly loved the odd words so much, I've started doing a Shakespearean word of the day and posting that on the board too with its present day English translation.  I'm encouraging the kids to use the word that day as much as possible in their conversations :)