Thursday, December 1, 2011

Shakespeare Art Video!


Here is the video that we started creating earlier today. I made it run smoothly, as well as added some background music and images, and I feel like it introduces our ideas well. If there are any suggestions as to how to improve it (on the condition that I have the capabilities to change it), please let me know! The sooner we get this posted on YouTube or other social media sites, the better! Below is the script for the video. I thought it would be nice to include all of our hard work.

When introducing Shakespeare into the classroom, it can sometimes seem daunting to both students and teachers alike. So, we created a series of lesson plans to help students better connect with Shakespeare.
In order to achieve this, art is used to connect students’ personal experiences and views to that of themes found within Shakespeare’s plays. The students are asked to respond creatively to Shakespeare to help them better process his plays. The play that we chose to do was Hamlet, because of its common use in high school classrooms.
In our lesson plans, we have broken the play down into different themes that students would have prior knowledge of and be able to connect with, to make it easier for the students to learn about Hamlet.

For example, one of our lesson plans involves the theme of indecision. To begin this lesson, thought provoking questions are derived from the text, such as ‘What do you think of Hamlet’s words “May my thoughts be bloody?”’ and “When can indecision have a positive or a negative effect?”. This will encourage the students to think critically about this theme.

After the discussion, the students are challenged to apply the theme of indecision through a specific art-making process.This solidifies the students’ connection between Shakespeare’s writings and their own lives.

To test these lesson plans we created examples of artwork that would be created in an actual application of the lesson. These examples as well as the correlating curriculum can be found on our blog shakespeareart.blogspot.com as well as on connexions, or cnx.org

2 comments:

  1. Yay! Look at our official video. I'm glad we put those pictures in the back

    ReplyDelete