Colonizing In A Tempest Reflection!

Hello and welcome back to my blog! Once again! Today, we are reflecting on my most recent project that just finished, Colonizing In A Tempest. Just like every project, we had a driving question, this project’s driving question was “How can we use Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization?”. In case you are wondering, tableaus are like a play except the characters stand in one position and each character says one line. Let’s just say that it was a lot harder than it looks. There were lots and lots of Milestones but sadly, I won’t be able to explain all of them to you, the only ones that I will explain are the ones that helped me best understand the driving question. 

1. What was life like in a colony? Skit + reflection 

So, number one, after we learned a whole lot about Colonization, we were assigned to create a skit to show the audience what life was like in a colony in the New France era, I found this pretty fun since I am half French Canadian. In my skit, we were supposed to present the different roles in a colony and different people. My group and I decided to not only show it from one perspective but from 3. In our skit, we decided to not always use the same characters but put them in different scenes. Here is my skit:

Next, completing this activity, we had to write a reflection paragraph, so if you’d like to understand the skit more clearly, here it is:

I think that this activity really helped me understand the driving question because I got to learn more about the different roles in a colony and got true chance to get a sense of acting!

2. Active Readings

Now, on the Shakespeare part of our project, to help us understand the Shakespearean language and the play better, we completed these Active Readings. Every few days, we would watch one act of the play (there were five) then complete an active reading that had to do with the play. 

Here they are:

I think that the active readings really helped me understand the driving question because it made the Shakespearean language much easier to understand and would force you to actually pay attention to the play and focus more while watching it. I especially had lots of trouble understanding the Shakespearean language because Shakespeare used all of these words and sentences that I did not understand one bit, it was very confusing. 

3. New France History & The Tempest Timeline

The next thing that helped me understand the driving question was the thing that pulled those “two worlds” together: The history of New France and the play “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare. After we created a mood board (that showed the emotions that The Tempest made you feel throughout the play), we tried to connect those to the feelings of the New France era, and it ended up pretty well. It looked something like this except in a real timeline:

1.1-Arrival of the first colonists

1.2-First contacts 

2.1- Early fur trade

2.2-The beaver wars

3.1- Treaty of Montreal

3.2-Treaty of Utrecht 

3.3-Seven years war

4.1-Acadian deportation 

5.1-Treaty of Paris

Here is the video of my presentation: