Hello fellow earthlings. It’s the end of the school year, yay. Of course this mean one more reflection post out of the many to come. This reflection is about our latest unit. The Tempest. The tempest is one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote before he died. This play had many plot lines that tied together at the end.
We had a driving question as usual, “How can we use Shakespeare’s “the tempest” and history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization?” In this blog post I will be answering this question through different activities we work on.
One of the activities that I found helpful to answer this question is that we had to read a document about why the First Nations traded with the newcomers. After reading the document we had to write a paragraph that explained why we thought they traded.
“The First Nations traded with the newcomers so they could get better materials than what they already had. First Nations people were lacking metal for building necessary tools. The newcomers brought metal with them and this began the trading between people. The First Nations were building homes out of wood and they used copper tools, the only tools available to them. When the newcomers came they brought other metals that were more efficient. The First Nations offered many items for trade and the newcomers thought they were of little value, until the beaver furs were offered, and these were thought to be more valuable. These first exchanges were just the beginning of trade. As the trading continued a warehouse was set up to continue this business. This was the beginning of the Hudson Bay Company.”
I found this helpful because we learned a couple of different reasons why the First Nations decided to trade with the newcomers.
The second activity that I found helpful is when we got into groups and did a skit about first contact. We had to write a reflection for it explaining how we learned from it.
“Yesterday day we prepared skits, it had to be a pantomime and have a script for a second part. My
group is me, Malaika, Anthony and Emily. We decided to show how people from France traveled to
New France to start a new life. So we decided I would die of the plague and Malaika would go and
travel to New France and start a new life and trade. So we wrote a script describing that.
We decided to have a background that could move from place to place.
When you zoom up and swipe it looks like Malaika’s walking somewhere.
I think I contributed to this group as much as the rest of my group did. I think we all contributed the
same amount. I think I could have been in the skit longer but we all decided that I would be the
character to die. I think that the skit went really well.”
After doing multiple activities our teacher told us what our final unit project would be. We were going to make a series of tableaus that show how Shakespeare’s the “Tempest” can represent first contact.
We were divided into groups to make a script and background.
Soon after working in these groups my mom realized that the project performance was the same time as the Shawn Mendes concert (which I booked tickets to in October) so I was put in a special “I won’t be at the performance“ group where we made animations to represent the first contact history.
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From what I heard the performance went really well. I think to answer the driving question”How can we use Shakespeare’s “the tempest” and history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization?” We took different parts of the history that we researched and fit it with similar parts in the acts and scenes of the Tempest.
Hope you enjoyed this blog post. Peace ✌🏻