Slide aside the salad bar, it is time for “The Scottish Play”! Yes, for the third year, Speyer’s Dining Hall became the stage for our eighth graders to present their own unique take on the Bard's famous tragedy. The third annual performance was a direct result of their exploration of the themes in the play as they immersed in the study of Mac**** aka “The Scottish Play”. (There is, as you may know, a theatrical tradition of bad luck associated with saying the name out loud and… well, read on to see if it’s true.)
Read MoreThey are about to graduate, but that didn’t deter them from one final culminating event. In a project that truly pulled together all they had learned in the nine years they were here at Speyer, our eighth graders studied Advocacy as their last Humanities unit. Humanities teacher and Deputy Head of School Mr. Deards challenged them to start an analysis of another person’s plight, first by asking, “Do I understand what it is to live his or her life?” He has more on this amazing final culminating event!
Read MoreWhat was it like for immigrants coming to America at the turn of the century? What happened at Ellis Island? How did new immigrants live in our city in the late 1800s? Our second graders have been exploring these questions and more during their Immigration at the Turn of the Century unit. To further their study, they traveled to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side and “time-traveled” during a dramatic role-playing exercise at school!
Read MoreThe motto in the Dining Hall was “Move over the dumplings and make way for Macbeth,” as it became a stage for Speyer eighth graders to presented their own unique take on the Bard's famous tragedy. The second annual performance was a direct result of their exploration of the themes in the play and their weeks-long in-depth analysis of the text. In their presentation, they depicted a trial of Macbeth, with speeches from attorneys and excerpts of the play and the eigth graders' writing exercises — all to present various arguments to the audience, who was serving as the jury. With more explanation of the process and the extraordinary path from the first lines of text the students studied to their final bows, we have a guest View writer: eighth grade Humanities teacher and Deputy Head of School Mr. Deards!
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