Hamlet - Day 9

During the first part of class today you worked with your group to create a visual portrayal of a topic from Act II. These included:

• Deception
• Trust / Distrust
• Doubt / Confidence
• Madness
• Baiting others / Fishing for information
• Privacy

For the second part we examined four relationships and how they change (or don't) over the course of the first three acts of the play:

• Hamlet and Gertrude - 1.2 / 3.4
• Hamlet and Claudius - 1.2 / 3.2 & 3.3
• Hamlet and Horatio - 1.2 / 3.2
• Hamlet and Ophelia - 1.3 / 2.1 / 2.2 / 3.1

Instead of discussing them or writing about them, you created a series of tableaux - silent freeze-frames to convey the feelings, attitudes, and motivations of the characters in these scenes. While two of you created these poses, another person in your group read the line(s).

Here's a link to a slideshow with photos of some of our tableaux: Hamlet Relationship Tableaux

Hopefully you took good notes during class - your work with both the themes and the relationships was insightful - keep track of these details!

Hamlet - Day 8

Today we watched Act II of Hamlet.  If you missed class, or want to watch it again, you can find links to the movie under the Hamlet tab above.

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.