Arts Update: Improv Sets Off Some Wild Stories
In our eighth grade theater intensive, the students learned about acting and empathy and then wrote monologues from a shoe’s perspective. They next analyzed a scene adapted from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They also created an original set design for the scene. At the end of the intensive, we learned to say “yes” and build on each others’ ideas in a series of improvisation games. Two favorites were “The Worst Day Ever” and “Late to Work.” In the first game, everyone has thirty seconds to regale their peers with a description of their worst day ever. In “Late to Work,” one student plays the employee, another plays their boss, and the remaining students are a group of co-workers. The employee is sent out of earshot, and the rest of the players come up with a reason the person is late for work. When the employee returns, the co-workers pantomime the reason, while the employee tries to make sense of their actions and explain what happened to the boss. The boss “helps” the employee by acknowledging when the reason is viable or not. Imaginations were in high gear as our employee explained being attacked by penguins, captured by flying pigs, and trying to resurrect a dead cat with the help of a cult of cat worshipers!
– Susan Dempsey, theater teacher
Seventh Grade Advisory Sharing Research With Their Peers
Since the start of the third trimester, the seventh grade Carter/Fogelstrom Advisory has launched a new project in which students are sharing a presentation on a topic of their choice. The students can choose and research any school-appropriate topic that they are interested in and that they feel would be valuable to their classmates.
Students have gone above and beyond with interesting slides, deep topic knowledge, and great use of Q&A time. So far we’ve heard from Nadia Lomelia on “Anxiety and Strategies to Help,” Ella Blecher on “Social Hierarchy of Social Media,” and Chloe Mitzenmacher on “School Dress Codes.”
– Gretchen Fogelstrom and Leal Carter, grade seven teachers
Sixth Graders Get to Where It All Began
Sixth graders used some advisory and resource time to concoct origin stories for a variety of BDS features and traditions, making short videos to tell their tales. The BDS sheep made more than a few appearances. The final products revealed their own origins in past social studies classes about religious creation stories, science class lessons about the life cycles of stars, English work on short story structure and coming of age … and more than a little bit of the Marvel universe of super-hero origin stories. The larger narrative here is some creative outdoor fun that could be shared across the whole grade.
– Dean Spencer, grade 6 social studies teacher
PE Update: Fifth Graders Start Track & Field
This week in physical education, our fifth graders started a heart-pounding track & field unit. After being introduced to every event outside early in the week, students came inside the Barn on Thursday afternoon for an exciting crossfit workout. The workout included battle ropes, agility ladders, med ball slams, jumping rope, farmer’s walks, sprints, bosu push-ups, and box jumps. Check out this video to see a quick look at the students in action!
– John O’Neill, athletics director and physical education teacher
