Andy Giordano's Biology students enjoyed some hands-on learning today. Photos follow of the worm dissections...
Showing posts with label Matt Hourigan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt Hourigan. Show all posts
Hamlet Cast Takes Fencing Lessons from Coach Schloss
Head Nordic Coach Jeff Schloss took some time off from the skinny skis recently to show SBA student-athlete-actors some of his fencing moves.
Enjoy the short film (with music by Truckee violinist Liz Glattly) and Joanne Knox's preview of the spring play, and get your tickets now for the big event!
"In preparation for the spring drama performance of an adapted version of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, students have been busy analyzing characters’ motives, memorizing lines, learning Shakespearean language, and even received some fencing instruction from Nordic coach extraordinaire, Jeff Schloss. The enthusiasm and excitement around this production is palpable! Our Hamlet (junior Chuck Klein) is supported by: Riley Plant (Claudius), Camille Hartley (Gertrude), Cassidy Cichowicz (Ophelia), Augie DeRyk (Polonius), Joe Piercy (Laertes), Lauren Dunn (Horatio), Chris Fitzpatrick (Ghost of Hamlet's father), Colter Fellows (Marcellus), and Devin Gill and Matt Hourigan (Players and Gravediggers). The play is held together by the explanation of our enthusiastic storytellers Dylan Murtha, Grace Hutton, and Katrin Larusson. Please join us Friday, June 15th (the night before graduation) at Judah lodge for our performance. You can reserve tickets by contacting Joanne Knox (jknox@sbacademy.org); the cost is $5 per a ticket and this production will sell out, so get your requests in soon! Thanks in advance for supporting SBA drama!" - Joanne Knox
Fall Festival in Film
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| Taylor Elicegui and Alex Alvarez |
All great costumes, to be sure, but, for simplicity, the hands-down and highly coveted Top Minimalist Costume Prize goes - in the humble and unbiased judgement of Marmot Man - to Mr. Stephen (with a "ph") Ascher.
Well-deserved kudos go out to Student Council and especially to Dylan Murtha and Master of Ceremonies Chuck Klein for a successful Fall Festival!
Enjoy the films, and keep an eye out for the Fighting Marmot Play of the Day, which goes to our esteemed Head of School.
-Marmot Man, powered by Blogpress and iPhone
Hopes and High Fives
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| Matt Hourigan |
Mission accomplished? You'll have to ask him in the fall, but we all know he eats...a lot. And now we understand why!
At the final All School Meeting of the 2010-2011 school year, Head of School Tracy Keller shared what students had contributed to a "string of hopes" around an orientation campfire gathering at Yosemite National Park back in September.
The All School Meeting was an opportunity to reflect on the passing of another school year into blissful summer, and to end the academic year on a truly high note.
Following Keller's speech, SBA Student Council presented a check from the student body in the amount of $600 to the High Fives Foundation - money raised throughout the course of the school year on "hats and sweats" days - and High Fives reciprocated with some treats for the 10th Grade Winter Term advisory, which won the inter-advisory fund-raising competition for High Fives.
Enjoy the film of our last All School Meeting of the 2010-2011 school year!
"Respectable Doctor or Body Snatcher?"
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| Injun Joe accusing Muff Potter of murder |
What was a respectable town doctor doing with two miscreants in a graveyard the night of his murder?
Was Muff Potter framed? Did Injun Joe do it?
Bringing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer back to life earlier this year in high-tech, journalistic fashion, Ambrose Tuscano's eighth-grade English class wrote, designed and published a sensational edition of The St. Petersburg Herald, featuring opinion pieces and complete news coverage of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Dr. Robinson and the disappearance of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Joe Harper.
Ambrose supplied the following overview of the class project:
The point of the paper was to get kids to think hard about the important plot elements of the story, and they also had to place themselves in the setting so as to distinguish between things a reader would know and things a resident of St. Petersburg would know. I think that their reading comprehension was better than it would have been if we'd just been reading the book and not writing the paper simultaneously. Basically the kids applied for jobs at a made-up newspaper in St. Petersburg (setting of Twain's story) during the time when ATS takes place. We had several types of editors, graphic designers, photographers, and columnists, and I tried to give each student one of his/her first choices of job.
Each student wrote two pieces for the paper, though some jobs required additional writing. The kids really enjoyed Tom Sawyer, and I like to think they learned something about what it takes to produce a finished, published piece of writing in the process.
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The "printing press" that our graphic designers were working on is actually Adobe InDesign, a state-of-the-art piece of software that is used for designing professional print media of all stripes. It's a rather complicated program to master, but it does allow users to put anything they can imagine onto the page.
Students assigned to graphic designer jobs had to work hard to learn how to create and manipulate text, photos, and graphic objects. For this particular project, our aim was to recreate the look of a mid-19th century publication, so digital color photos had to be processed with Adobe Photoshop to become black and white and look more like something that could have been taken with early film cameras. All told, the kids learned some valuable real-world skills and gained respect for the work that goes into producing real daily newspapers.
The process of determining which stories would be written was one of the most important for this project. Each time we finished a significant chunk of reading we would have a "staff meeting" in which all newspaper employees would brainstorm possible story ideas from the reading. This process helped students focus in on the major events of the story, but also made them think about it through the prism of what residents of St. Petersburg would have known about Tom Sawyer's Adventures. Not all of his exploits were public knowledge, for instance, which forced students to think about what information they could include in newspaper stories and what they couldn't. Where good information was not provided in the story, students did have to creatively extend the story to create names for unnamed minor characters, create backstory where none was provided, and envision events that readers did not witness. All in all, a positive experience with some great learning opportunities.
Thanks, Ambrose, for the copy and for the great teaching! Clicking on any of the newspaper thumbnails below will allow you to view pages of The St. Petersburg Herald in full(er) size.
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