What good could it possibly to do rewrite one of the greatest presidential speeches of all time?
In an 8th grade classroom... A lot of good!
As awesome as Abraham Lincoln was and as impressive as his Gettysburg Address is, it just isn't written in language our 8th graders "get."
So we rewrote it.
Each pair of students was given a short phrase or sentence of the famous speech, with the task to make it shorter and easier to understand.
When they were finished they each read their statement aloud, and we taped them together on the board to create our very own version of the Gettysburg Address.
The final results...
Some of the comments I heard throughout the class period...
- Wow! This is way easier to understand.
- Oh, now I get it.
- This was fun!
- Yay, we got an easy one! :-)
