Hamlet Gallery Walk

On January 25th, my AP classes did a modified version of the tone word gallery walk activity we did at the Folger this summer. We listened to Renaissance music courtesy of a couple of really awesome playlists on Spotify including an album from the Folger Consort while the students walked around the room inspecting various artistic representations of Hamlet meeting his father's ghost.  As the students walked, they left a tone word from a list they have as a permanent resource in their writing folders on a post-it near each.

The pictures were diverse.  Many of them came from my research at the Folger courtesy of Luna,
their digital image collection.  One was a cartoon from the collection of Hamlet references I am constantly collecting from various sources.  The final was a painting I had seen in the Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo, Brazil while I was there for a summer program four years ago.

When the students were done choosing their tone words and looking at the words of others, I had them move to stand in front of the one they thought most accurately represented Act 1.4.  They had to talk with others who had also picked that image and be prepared to explain why it was best based on textual evidence. Lots of them "bandwagoned," but all of them had well-supported explanations based on the visual source and Hamlet.

Finally, I broke them into groups of two or three and told them to create a "3-D painting" of the perfect scene to convey the tone they thought the the text indicated. They had so much fun with this, with pulling each other into poses, with getting just the right facial expressions, with explaining how the use of a jacket draped across their head or a foam sword helped to convey the feeling of the scene appropriately.  I took photos of all of them to preserve their work of art, and I put them in our Google Classroom for them all to enjoy later.

As we were wrapping things up and preparing for the trip to the cafeteria, one of the students in my 5th period class said, "Ms. Waters, this was just FUN. I was expecting this class to be boring because, you know, it's reading and stuff, but this was so good. And interesting."

That may be some of the highest praise I've ever gotten. Thank you, Folger folk, for making that happen.