7-8

Monday, March 27, 2017

Tom Joad Speaks

Twelfth Night began to really grow into itself this week. More students set their scripts down and rehearsed scenes from memory--even those who weren't quite ready, a brave and beneficial act. We're finding new levels, building relationships amongst characters, and creating bits of comic business at every rehearsal. We closed out the week by running through the entire first half of the play (that's a week ahead of schedule).

This week the 7-8s continued their hard work on the Place Out of Time. Testimony on poverty and crime was posted by Tom Joad, protagonist of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (as it happens, Karl's favorite book). Students wrote comments on this testimony and communicated with each other about it. In addition, our selected justice, Alfred Hitchcock, began drafting a statement of legal philosophy to share with all of the students in schools across the region engaged in the activity.

Math found the kids working with absolute value and inequalities. Sam spent a lot of time with the algebra students working on the practice of substituting a complex expression with a simpler one in order to make problems easier to comprehend. The pre-algebra group concentrated on converting fractions into decimals, with a particular focus on repeating decimals. The group also welcomed Ed Feng back for some probability work.

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