English

Ninth grade students in Robin Neal’s English class used video as a way to learn and teach others about grammar.
Working in groups, students were assigned a grammar topic such as mastering the colon, comma rules, and avoiding fragment and run-on sentences. Students worked to become experts on their topics and produce short videos explaining their [...]

It all started with a student’s question in a 10th grade English class.
The class was reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, and Asa Welch ’12 asked teacher Robin Neal, “Aren’t we going to do something?”
A different teacher might have given a cursory answer about how slavery is an age-old [...]

The students in Debi Ellman’s creative writing elective got some expert advice on screenwriting from Brad Falchuk ’89, an executive producer and co-creator of Glee, one of this year’s most successful new TV shows.
To help them understand how a story makes the leap from the page to the screen, Brad sent the class the script [...]

A trend in Hollywood has been to take classic movies, plays, or comic books and modernize them to appeal to a new generation. That trend has made its way to an eighth grade English class at Beaver.
After reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, students in Kathleen Kosberg’s class were asked to think about a movie version [...]

The sixth edition of the sixth grade Biggest Dig project is underway. This is the signature event of the sixth grade year at Beaver (and, oh yeah, it takes six weeks to complete).
Students have been assigned a year from as far back as 17,000 years ago up to 2009. Each year comes with a major [...]