Tag: Reflections

A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Acts I – III

Our goal this week in 10HUMws was to continue to read the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a class and to become familiar with Shakespeare’s language and the story of the play.  We are also trying to visualize the play as we read the play script directions.

In class, we have got up to Act 3 Scene two. Hermia and Lysander ran away and they slept under a tree. Because they are not married, they sleep far away from each other. At the same time, the fairy King Oberon is having an argument with the fairy Queen Titania and she flew away from him. Angry, he ordered Puck to give her eye drops that make her fall in love with the first person she sees. Titania woke up and the first person she saw was Bottom, the tradies actor whose head Puck turned into a donkey, and fell in love with him.

I played the part of Titania and quite enjoyed my part, popping in here and there. Everyone read in their own style and pace but we have not got to the point that people are confident enough to stand up while they read, and I hope by next week that we are confident enough to. I want to get better at reading the words fluently and ‘act’ out the words.

I am quite ready to stand and read aloud. I think this helps people be more confident and believe in themselves, as well as easily identifying the reader so that the play can go smoothly.

To help our class enjoy this more, I think we should have people standing up to act for a short while. They don’t have to be good, but standing up with other people helps them be confident as you don’t want to act alone while everyone else sits there and looks at you. I’d imagine it would be quite fun to do this, but this is just my idea. Maybe include a few simple props as well, like crowns, swords, wings etc (although some people might be silly with them).

Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to comment on any thoughts you have. I will leave a comment on Braeden‘s blog and Harrison‘s blog, so check theirs out too!

A scene from the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream movie:

ShakespearesPlaylist: A Midsummer Night's Dream — Rachael Dickzen

Source: racheldickzen.com

 

My first foray into a Shakespearean Play!

Our goal this week in 10HUMws (Year 10 Humanities All the world’s a stage) was to learn more about Shakespeare’s play structure, make connections with our novel, A Cue For Treason, and have an introduction to the plot lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare.

We started this topic by reading the novel Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease, in which Shakespeare was a character in the story and was told with a nice viewpoint. We then read some background information about Elizabethan England and around the time that the story was set in.  We didn’t read Midsummer Night’s Dream straight away but the children’s version instead, so that everyone gets the idea of the plotline as some said Shakespeare can be quite hard to read.

After Ms Lees read to the class the whole children’s version, we move on to reading the actual play. We started with act one, and shared out the roles for Act 1. I was Hippolyta (I had only a few lines at the start of the act) and found that reading in this way made it much more interesting. Some of my classmates stumbled on a few lines and giggled at the funny words, but we managed to get through Act 1 quite quickly. There were lots of new vocabulary and phrases we learnt as we went along, such as ‘I wooed thee’ means ‘I tried to win you’, reknownèd meaning well-known and the interesting French accents which suggested how the upper class of England used to speak.

My next goals for this topic is to speak more, like trying different roles that have a bigger part. I also see a lot of my classmates reading out boringly or giggling and falling out of character, so I will try to not do that. I am looking forward to the next 10HUMws class to see what happens next in the story. A link to our class’ daily planner is here, where you can check out what we are doing.

A Midsummer Night's Dream | Northern Ballet

A scene in MSND with the fairies, Northern Ballet.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what your thoughts on this post are in the comments!