Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
All students are required to comment once a week. A week goes from Monday to Sunday. A comment can be a response to my or others' posts --- or a new post. All posts must be relevant to class discussions and assignments. Each post should be 1-3 paragraphs. Remember, it is OK to disagree with one another, but we must always be RESPECTFUL of one another.
About a quarter of my 8th grade year was spent reading and learning about Shakespeare. At the end, our grade hosted a Shakespeare festival. Each individual language arts class was assigned a different play. My class was given Romeo and Juliet. The other plays included A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth. Before acting out the parts, every class needed to learn about Shakespeare and his life. Then we would read each play, discuss it as a class, and sometimes have a pop quiz to test our knowledge.
ReplyDeleteThe experience was very positive. Reading Shakespeare's plays was hard at first to adapt to his type of language. Each play was different. Romeo and Juliet examplified Shakespeare's romance. Macbeth was a tragedy. Midsummer's Night was different and more of a comical piece from Shakespeare. Shakespeare used a lot of puns and different literary techniques like that. Reading his plays was amazing and I could tell how he is considered today one of the greatest writers.
When it came to acting out the plays, this really helped us to further connect with the characters and see how Shakespeare wanted his plays to be executed. I had played the part of Juliet. I dont have much acting experience, but this really brought out my acting side and showed me how to really become the character. I spent many weeks memorizing not only lines, but ways in which to say them. It was all about having the audience feel what Juliet had felt. The Shakespeare festival was something I really enjoyed and helped me to understand Shakespeare and his wonderful language.
Shakespeare's story lines are very interesting, but difficult to understand because of the way in was written. When reading Shakespeare, it can be frustrating if too much time is spent on one line or it can be very intriguing.
ReplyDeleteLast year, our eighth grade class did our Shakespeare lesson at the end of the year, so most of us did not want to learn. Before we read "Romeo and Juliet", we went to a theater to see it be preformed. I thought that gave us a better idea of the story line. We also, had to do some worksheets to show what we understood from the play. Then, we read and preformed the original version and the translation. Every page we read, the teacher discussed with us. Our teacher really wanted us to understand the play, but lost us in the way she did it. The teacher spent too much time on "Romeo and Juliet". I think if we were to spend less time discussing every line and just read it, my experience last year would have been better with Shakespeare.
The language of Shakespeare is hard to understand or read as students at our level. It was required to read Shakespeare in 8th grade for Chester. We read Romeo and Juliet and I had both a positive and negative experience, so really I am neutral. Overall though, I do not prefer to read Shakespeare. I find it is hard to read and very frusterating at certain points. I may feel it is frusterating because last year we were not really taught a lot. We read it in class and it was your choice to follow along, your choice to read the english translations or not. We had them in our book, but sometimes it got confusing to hear the presenters reading modern english and us reading the newer english at our desks. For me, it was hard to hear and read something different. Also, we did not really go over everything we learned or translate lines. The only reason why I got a decent grade on the test was because I knew the story of Romeo and Juliet. I do not feel I learned much or had a good experience reading that style. Now that we are reading Othello, it's given me a negative attitude to want to read it.
ReplyDeleteThe positive outcome was the play we put on at school. Even though I was not performing, it was good to actually see what we were reading by our class mates. The one's who performed got an 100 average into their test score just for their time and effort for the production.
Another thing our school did to get us used to Shakespeare was to have a local theatre perform A Midnight Summer's Dream. This was a good, entertaing, and an easy to understand performance. I was not falling asleep and it kept me interested to hear the style of the language. I think the positive parts of Shakespeare, for me, was to actually see the performances. I am glad we are doing that for Othello. It has helped me the first night of reading!
The two books or plays that have been written by shakespere that i have read have been Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. I read both of these last year in 8th grade and we mostly went into more detail on Romeo and Juliet. I personally feel that Shakesperes writing is somewhat difficult to understand. He writes in Elizabethan which i have not studied a lot or been aquainted with. But the Romeo and Juliet book that my class read had an english translation on the next page so if you didn't understand something then you could just look at the translation. My experiences with these two plays were somewhat positive. I feel that i learned many interesting and important things about the great writer Skakespere and i did indeed enjoy the play Macbeth. Romeo and Juliet i knew the basic storyline so it was not too interesting.
ReplyDeleteWhen I previously read Shakespeare I felt as if it was too advanced for me because of the "old english" language. I felt that it was too boring. Shakespeare's writings are boring for me because they dont interest me. Shakespeare is "so popular" in the past because of the way he interperats his writing. I do not like how he copies others stories and plot's because its not his imagination of a play, he got it from someone else. Even though I have not read any other plays yet other then "Romeo and Juliet," I do not enjoy his writing because its not coming from him. In my preferance I would rather read and watch the authors imagination not what the author took from someone else. Overall Shakespears plays do not interest me in any way because hes boring and he is not creative. This is in my opinion.
ReplyDeletelast year our teacher decided to do shaksphere toward the end of the year. since we didnt have much time to do it we rushed through it to finish it in time. we read the modern english and the the shaksphereian english. it was a pretty enjoyebale experienc. we also got to see the play performed in morristown and the was fun also.
ReplyDeleteLast year, my grade read Shakespeare. My teacher made it interesting, she had us get up in class and read it. When something exciting were to happen, she would make us sound excited and actually do a few movements. It was fun and everyone was able to pay attention to it. Elizabethan was very difficult to understand. Our books had the "modern day" English in the side, which helped if we didn't really understand something. My experience with Shakespeare was neutral, I didn't hate it but I didn't love it.
ReplyDeleteIn 8th grade my class read Romeo and Juliet after we saw it proformed in Morristown. It was pretty enjoyable because we got to act out most of the play and there was a "modern english" side that was a lot easier to follow than the shakespearean. Though, because we saw the play preformed I found it easier to follow. The only negitive I had with the reading was that I felt rushed throughout the whole thing. We didn't start reading until the end of the year and it felt like my teacher just spead through it to finish.
ReplyDeleteLast year we read Shakespear. I actually somewhat enjoeyed it. The only thing iidont reallly like is the way they tend to talk. sometimes i cant really understand what they are saying or what they mean by saying something. During my freshman year (right now presently) i amd starting to understand it more. and i realize the more i understand the more i tend to like it alor more.
ReplyDeleteDuring 8th grade most of our year was spent studying works of Shakespeare. In my English class we read "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" through these works most of our class struggled to understand the vernacular that Shakespeare used. But, once we broke down our reading sentence by sentence all Shakespeare writings came to us, once we understood the plays we assigned parts and acted out the plays. I don't want to speak for my last English class but I think our whole class enjoyed reading and acting out Shakespeare's plays. But, learning the language Shakespeare uses is a bit tedious, this is because you cant act out a line properly if you don't know the true meaning of it that also goes with responding to a line. So, if you were in the play you had to under stand everyone's line not just your own. Overall my 8th grade Shakespeare experience was general fine.
ReplyDeleteMy experience with Shakespeare was fairly good. I found the story and the characters to be both entertaining and thought provoking. I did find the langa=uage a bit difficult to understand at times though. I enjoyed challenging myself to understand the vocabulary and can now use it expand on the things I want to say in my writing.
ReplyDelete