The Sophomore Renaissance Project

In order to provide the students with background information on the Renaissance in a way that doesn't infringe on class time excessively and that combines multiple learning opportunities and assessments, I'm having my sophomores undertake the following project. I'll use the information the students gathered for a class "Renaissance fair" on April 23, Shakespeare's birthday.

The Sophomore Renaissance Project

The PowerPoint

Part I. Complete a PowerPoint with a definition of the Renaissance and a profile of two Renaissance personages. Also include a definition of the Elizabethan Renaissance and how it created English pride as well as information about the life and contributions of William Shakespeare.

When was William Shakespeare born? When did he die?

How many plays did he write? What kind of plays were they?

How many poems and what kinds of poems did he write?

What was his theater company called?

Include relevant images for all your slides.

Due Feb. 7

"Words, words, words."

Part II. “Words, words, words.”

As you learned in Part I, Shakespeare contributed over 2,000 words and phrases to the English language. Write ten words and their parts of speech and definitions.

academe	accused	addiction	advertising	amazement
arouse	assassination	backing	bandit	bedroom
beached	besmirch *	birthplace	blanket	bloodstained
barefaced	blushing	bet	bump	buzzer
caked	cater	champion	circumstantial	cold-blooded
compromise	courtship	countless	critic	dauntless *
dawn	deafening	discontent	dishearten	drugged
dwindle *	epileptic	equivocal *	elbow	excitement
exposure	eyeball	fashionable	fixture	flawed
frugal *	generous	gloomy	gossip	green-eyed
gust	hint	hobnob *	hurried	impede *
impartial *	invulnerable *	jaded  *	label	lackluster *
laughable	lonely	lower	luggage	lustrous *
madcap	majestic	marketable	metamorphize	mimic
monumental	moonbeam	mountaineer	negotiate	noiseless
obscene	obsequiously *	ode *	olympian	outbreak
panders	pedant *	premeditated	puking	radiance
rant *	remorseless *	savagery	scuffle *	secure
skim milk	submerge	summit *	swagger	torture
tranquil	undress	unreal	varied	vaulting
worthless	zany	gnarled *	grovel

Write original sentences for the starred words. We will have a quiz on those words on Feb. 28.

Word table is from http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html.

Neologism: new word

Shakespeare was a neologism expert, it would seem. Let’s be Shakespearean and create our own new word. Create a slide with your word and its part of speech and definition (make sure the definition of the word is in the correct part of speech). Include a relevant image.

Due Feb. 13

Foreign Language and ShowMe Get in the Act

Part III. Be a Renaissance man/woman

As you can tell by now, a Renaissance person has a lot of talents, one of them being a facility with languages. Make sure your personages assessment is corrected (this is the assignment where you assessed who the two most important people of the Renaissance were), and then translate it into another language: Hebrew, Spanish or another language you may know. Ask a language teacher for assistance if you need it. Record your personages assessment – in English and another language – on the ShowMe app, placing relevant images in the ShowMe to make your presentation more interesting. Link your ShowMe to your PowerPoint.

Due Feb. 26

Part IV. Renaissance thinking in the modern world

Choose a figure from the last two hundred years whom you feel is a Renaissance person, and explain what multiple talents this person has/had and how this person contributed to the world. Create 3-5 slides on the person, and include relevant and exciting images. 

Due March 6

The Sonnet Paper

During this time, the students and I will be studying Shakespeare's sonnets in class and then the students will have to explicate a sonnet on their own, using literary criticism such as Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. This paper is always challenging for the students, as they've never done serious research before, and Vendler needs to be translated into English for them.  ;)

Getting Used to Show Me

Finding a Place for ShowMe

With the introduction of an iPad cart to The Frisch School at the beginning of the school year and the distribution of iPads to the entire freshman class last month, using apps will soon be second nature to any Frisch teacher. I've had an iPad since September of 2011, but since my students did not, I couldn't really exploit it as a teaching tool. This year, obviously, that has changed. After attending technology boot camp this past summer with the school's amazing Director of Educational Technology, Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky, I decided to make my way slowly through the plethora of apps available to educators. One which I focused on is ShowMe.

I started the year using it in my sophomore grade and had students create ShowMe presentations about their summer reading assignment, the Gothic novel. Students worked in groups and over the course of a few days, but I realized doing so was not a good way to use the app. A ShowMe presentation really needs to be made in one sitting, and I also didn't love the app for group work. I think its features work best for a single user.

ShowMe at The Frisch Africa Encounter

When the sophomores were well into their project-based learning venture of the year, an interdisciplinary unit exploring Africa through a myriad of lenses, I remembered the ShowMe app when the students and I decided to make an audio tour of an analog savannah and jungle the grade was creating on the school's stage. The app seemed perfect for an auditory venture.

First, a couple of students and I wrote a script for the presentation, one which was based on research many students in the grade did on the African veld and rainforest. The script called for animal sounds to be heard at certain junctures, so we purchased elephant, lion and general jungle sounds from iTunes. We also needed sounds of the "Frisch jungle," students joking around and talking to each other. We recorded those sounds on an iPhone, to use in the ShowMe.

Since we also wanted the script to be read in Hebrew, the students approached one of the Hebrew Language teachers and had her write a condensed version of what we wanted to say. We had actually wanted French and Spanish versions of the audio as well, so all the languages the school teaches would be represented in the tours (OK, full disclosure: we confess we didn't plan on anyone reciting anything in Aramaic, the language in which the students learn Talmud.) However, the Africa unit was taking so much effort to put together, we couldn't spare the time to make so many different versions of the script. If we do the multi-disciplinary project again, we'll start writing the presentation earlier in the process.

The ShowMe app became the perfect venue for the presentation of the audio tour. We had three students, one male, one female, and one proficient Hebrew speaker, recite the scripts we prepared. We then set up ten iPads with earphones on the evening of The Frisch Africa Encounter, the night on which parents and teachers can experience what the students produced during the month-long project. Parents and teachers were able to wander through the savannah and rainforest, listening to the following ShowMe presentations:

The Frisch Africa Encounter Audio Tour: Male Voice

The Frisch Africa Encounter: Female Voice

The Frisch Africa Encounter: Hebrew

The history teacher on the left worked with the sophomores on their research projects,
while the Hebrew teacher on the right, among other activities over the course of the month,
 helped the sophomores with the Hebrew ShowMe 

Multi-Disciplinary Uses for ShowMe

Going forward, I plan to use ShowMe in the way I used it for The Frisch Africa Encounter. However, I want each of my students to write a script and then recite it, once I've proofread and edited their work with them. I think the app can be a wonderful tool that not only enables students to do some scriptwriting, but also to think about an audience they want to reach with their words. Developing an appropriate voice is always a challenge for students, but having to recite their work will give them a chance to think about who they are addressing and what kind of tone and language would be most appropriate for their work. I also think, in an English classroom, students should become proficient in articulation and verbal presentation of ideas; ShowMe would certainly develop those skills.

Script writing would also be appropriate in a history class, after an exploration of one or more famous speeches. Students can then be given a chance to write their own Patrick Henry speech or Gettysburg Address. And foreign language as well can make use of the app in the ways I've described. In fact, if your school is focused on interdisciplinary collaboration, students could write a speech in English or history and then work with their foreign language teachers to translate it into the language they're studying.

And who knows? Maybe next year, I'll be writing about an audio tour students wrote in Aramaic!

For more information about the Africa project, see The Frisch Africa Encounter blog post.