January Newsletter
By Hadley and Sarah
What have we been up to in Humanities?
Pay It Forward
After returning from a long winter break, the freshmen morning team watched the film Pay It Forward. The movie is about a young boy who tries to change the world for the better after his teacher gives him the opportunity. He creates a plan that becomes known as "paying it forward". After viewing the film, we were assigned to write a paper about how we payed it forward to someone. The point of this entire lesson was to see how individual acts of kindness can grow into a big movement.
Pay It Forward Trailer
Helping Those In Need
The way our class payed it forward, before watching the movie, was by helping those in need. The last day of school before break, December 20, our class went to work on sorting donated clothes for local families and creating cards for them, as well as those in Newtown, Connecticut. Part of the class decorated holiday-themed cards for local families, while others created sympathy cards for the families and friends of Sandy Hook victims. With that going on, a small group of students helped Pauline LaLiberte, our school social worker, and her husband, sort donated clothing items for the local families in need. The holiday season can be a very stressful time of year for these families, so we wanted to make it easier for them to enjoy their time together.
The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail
For the fourth unit, the class read The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. The book was actually in play form. It is about the life of Henry David Thoreau and his ideas. He is a transcendentalist, believing in living a simple life. The essential question for the unit was "What ideas create a culture that balances the needs of the individual with the needs of the whole?" Some activites we did during this unit was learning about the Bill of Rights, Landmark Cases, and our Socratic Seminar. The seminar was on Security vs. Liberty. We ended the unit by watching the film Skokie.