It seems unlikely that fifth and sixth-graders would have much to discuss with high school seniors. But that’s not the case with two groups of neighborhood students.
Students from Northlake Elementary and Lake Highlands High School’s Advanced Placement English class are trading thoughts about topics most adults find challenging – the themes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Homer’s Odyssey.
“Once they got over their initial shyness there were all of these amazing conversations going on,” says Northlake Elementary teacher Eileen Friou.
The discussions are an offshoot of the RISD’s “vertical teaming” project where teachers from elementary schools, junior highs and high schools work more closely together to ensure continuity for students as they move from one level to the next.
Friou says she and David Wood, the Lake Highlands Advanced Placement teacher, were at a vertical team training session when they discovered their students cover some of the same material. The two discussed how Friou could take the concepts being taught by Wood and prepare her students for a spot in an honors class.
“He (Wood) wants his program to grow so we should be working on the same concepts. At the same time they’re learning to love literature,” Friou says.
The Northlake class visited the high school in December to discuss the Odyssey and then invited the Lake Highlands seniors to their school for small-group discussions on Hamlet. Friou says her students read a prose version of Hamlet to prepare for the talks. The youngsters “held their own” when discussing the play’s language and its themes of jealousy and revenge. One student compared Shakespeare’s work to The Lion King and the entire class clapped when Claudius died, Friou says.
“They get very passionate and opinionated,” Friou says.
Woods’ students benefited from the discussions too, she says. During one exercise the students had to articulate to their younger counterparts how they would support the thesis statements they had written on one of the books from the Odyssey.
“It’s not too soon to have them focus on this,” Friou says. “We thought it would be neat to make them see what they could aspire to.”
