School. Is. Over. I still don’t believe it. Humanities has ended with a bang and with our last project of Grade 8. Colonizing in a Tempest was all about one driving question. “How can we use Shakespeares “The Tempest” and the history of New France to stage dramatic tableaus that help an audience understand the lasting effects of colonization?” Basically what this means is we watched and read The Tempest. As we watched the play we filled out some Active Reading sheets. This helped us actually understand what was going on without have to learn the form of English Shakespeare wrote it in. It was also a good way to organize how the two plot lines progressed and eventually came together to tie up the Tempest.

After learning about the Tempest we began to learn about the colonization of New France. We first began that learning by creating a sort of mini-skit about how we think New France was run and performing it to the class. Our skit was about some Colonists robbing First Nations of their furs. We had to present the play twice. We presenting without speaking first and then moved onto a presentation where we could speak. We then had to write a reflection on the skit so here is mine.

The skit was kind of like a practice run for us as we knew we had to present tableaus very soon. The non speaking part showed me how effective a movement of the body can do to display your message. This helped me in the long run because of how you must use body language to say what you want to say in a presentation like a tableau where you only have 1 or zero lines. Once we finished that we moved into learning about the major historical events of the colonization. We wrote down the events onto a massive historical timeline and decided if it was a benefit to the Europeans or the First Nations. There was actually a downward trend as the relationships between the two groups were not very stable. But we were finally ready for the tableaus. We started off by picking one of the nine scenes from The Tempest. My group was going to be representing Act V Scene I. We decided as a class what each tableau would show. Act V Scene I was the Treaty of Paris, which wrapped up the colonization battle between the British and French. It was fitting because Act V is the last act of The Tempest. We then took characters from The Tempest and those characters would represent the nations involved in the historical event. Then we would take a line from The Tempest that the character had said in that scene and that would be the one line the character has for the tableau. This whole process really showed how the Tempest was very much alike to the colonization of New France. The explorers reached shore and just began taking over the land that already had inhabitants. Soon it was just a task of memorizing the lines and the actual performance.

This project was really fun and I think I learned a lot. I really enjoyed watching and reading The Tempest and I think it was really cool how it was almost an exact recreation of the colonization of New France even though it was written almost 100 years before. I also took a narration part so my presentation skills definitely improved and I had a lot of fun with the performance because I learned a lot about theatre that I didn’t really know. All in all, it was a fun project and a great way to finish Grade 8. I will see you all in the next blog post! 👋