Hamlet Day 7 - "To be or not to be..."

Happy Monday!

After a brief recap of Act II, we turned our attention to Hamlet's famous soliloquy in Act III, Scene 1. Even though these are some of the most famous lines ever written, our job is not to just pay respect to them but rather to explore them in terms of the ideas Hamlet raises, how he speaks of them, and how they potentially connect to some of our own concerns.  The writing activity we did with them is called an "exploded imagery" - each of you selected a line or phrase and used it as a first line of a new piece of writing. We shared all of these out loud, inserting them into a read-through of the speech. Sound complicated? Cool? It sounded fantastic in class!

Hamlet - Day Six

On day six, we worked with our groups to make sense of Act Two. We took a closer look at the key events, and examined the issues/concerns elicited by these focal points of the play.

We used a graphic organizer to record our ideas about Act Two, and on Monday, we will examine how these events overlap/ intersect/ parallel each other.

Also, Mrs. Phillips’s classes learned about interpretive questions, and began practicing writing their own questions. You can access the Interpretive Questions presentation here: Interpretive Questions.

Hamlet - Day Five

On day five, we watched Act 1 of Hamlet. In class, we will be watching the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet (1996).

If you are absent on a day in which we are watching the film, you can check to see if the Kenneth Branagh version is available at the Deerfield Public Library, or you watch it here:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Hamlet - Day Four

On day four, we took a closer look at Hamlet’s first soliloquy, examining how the figurative language reveals his feelings about death, God and religion, his father, his mother, and King Claudius.

Then, we took a look at advice that characters gave to each other during Act 1, Scene 3, and discussed what the interactions reveal about each character. With your groups, you examined one of the following interactions:

• Laertes gives advice to Ophelia
• Polonius gives advice to Laertes
• Polonius gives advice to Ophelia

Last, we picked out the most important lines from Act 1, Scene 5, when the ghost speaks to Hamlet and charges him to revenge his murder, most foul and unnatural.

Hamlet - Day 3 #Hashtags

We started today with a short quiz - a check for your level of understanding at this early stage in our reading.

Then, with your groups, you explored an assigned section of Act 1, scene 2:

• lines 1-40
• lines 41-66
• lines 67-89
• lines 90-121
• lines 165-196
• lines 197- end of scene

After a short discussion of what happens in those lines you created three Hashtags to represent it.

What are hashtags? They are short bits of language used to do several different things:

• a word or phrase used to identify a key idea
• a word or phrase used to comment or show a perspective / opinion
• a word or phrase used to link that idea to similar ones appearing elsewhere on social media
• a word or phrase used to allow others to search for and find it

For your three hashtags, you created two of them with people in your group, and one of them used language from your assigned section of the text.

#FewWordsBigIdeas

#Methinks

#TooMuchInTheSun


6th period

8th period

Hamlet - Day Two - Ghosts

Today we spent some time writing and thinking about ghosts:

• What do they usually do?
• When do they appear?
• What might they mean / represent?

We shared answers to those questions, and then some ghost stories, as a way of talking about the ghost that appears in Act I, scene 1.

You also met with your small group for the first time in a new room configuration - you will stay with these groups throughout our study of the play.

With those groups you read Act 1, scene 1 and discussed these questions:

• What does the ghost look like?
• What do the characters want to know from it?
• What is the back history we learn in this scene?

Don't forget to check the calendar for your homework - you are reading Act 1, scene 2 this weekend.