Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

It’s been a lovely week for collaboration!

Yesterday morning Ken and I brainstormed new strategies to get his seniors to better understand characters and motivation in Hamlet.  This led to a nifty new strategy. 

We grouped the students into Hamlet communities–Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, and their choice of one other character.  Students are each maintaining blogs as their characters, reporting their personal responses to each scene as they read it. They are also responsible for commenting on the blogs of the other three characters in their communities. http://hamlet06.wikispaces.com/.  (Because no one selected Polonius, Ken is modeling good posting through his character.)

And in another activity relating to perspective and deeper understanding. . .

After watching the film Control Room, reading sections of Persepolis, and examining the current nuclear situation in Iran, Jeff, the Global Studies teacher and I, developed a new project.  Students will create a mock special issue of a news magazine originating from a non-Western country of their choice. http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/newsmagazine.htm

We’ve set students up with links to international news media and are encouraging them to frame their editorial decisions based on their selected country’s cultural norms, political concerns, government restrictions.

And, just for fun, they’ll be doing their covers using Flagrant Disregard’s magazine cover tool.