How do we know when our students are aware of the thoughts and motivations of the characters they read about? In this lesson, students will use their knowledge and analysis of the characters to produce a "cross-fire" show where characters interview one another in a discussion format.
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"This lesson will take three 45-minute class periods. [Visited 11 December 2005]
Even in the 17th century, people used lines to get dates and inspire love. Students will examine a chapter from a mid-17th century handbook, The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence, Or the Arts of Wooing and Complementing , which offers to "young practioners [sic] of Love and Courtship set forms of expressions for imitation." Reading 17th century pick-up lines will give students an opportunity to practice reading a 17th century text and perhaps inspire their own success in love. The handbook also provides an interesting glimpse at language as a tool of persuasion; students can easily see how this relates to the language of Romeo and Juliet. [Visited 11 December 2005]
Students often ask questions about marriage in Shakespeare's day. This activity allows students to examine a primary source from 1604 to help them gain a better understanding of the rules of marriage in the early seventeenth century, and to apply that knowledge to the play in several ways.
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This activity will take one to two class periods. [Visited 11 December 2005]
Today students will examine a primary source document from 1684 that includes many of the same lines found in Romeo's speech to Juliet in 1.5. Students will compare the texts and discuss the different conception of authorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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This lesson will take one class period. [Visited 11 December 2005]
Communicating with peers is extremely important to adolescents; teenagers burn up hours talking on the phone or writing notes to their friends. This assignment allows them to write letters in class while exploring the language, characterization, plot, and themes of Romeo and Juliet .
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The writing and response activity takes as little as 10-15 minutes per period, repeated as often as you wish over the study of the entire play.
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Ask them to write a letter to Romeo about his romantic problems. Students may offer advice, commiserate, or question Romeo's feelings.
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Read the same scene with another class. Give each student in this class a disk from the previous class and ask them to read and respond to the letter written. Ask the students to address their responses to the letter-writer and explain where they agree or disagree with the ideas expressed to Romeo. [Visited 11 December 2005]
This lesson plan is intended for a middle school group that will learn how Shakespeare uses figurative language and abstract comparison in the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet . To this end, students will play figurative language charades with 10 lines from the scene. The goal is to make figurative language more accessible to students and to help them visualize and identify specific figures of speech.
This lesson will take one 50-minute class period. [Visited 11 December 2005]
Once you and your students have read and discussed Romeo and Juliet , take the students back into the text to further analyze individual characters. This activity can be used to demonstrate knowledge of the characters or it can serve as preparation for a character analysis essay.
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This activity will take one to two class periods, depending on the ability level of the class. [Visited 11 December 2005]
After reading Shakespeare's plays, students may wonder if all Elizabethan fathers were patriarchal dictators. In this lesson, students read and analyze sections from Charles Gibbon's 1591 A Work Worth the Reading to discover that the issue was far from black and white even four hundred years ago.
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This lesson will take one class period. [Visited 11 December 2005]
Part of the fun of teaching Romeo and Juliet is letting students see how the play is about much more than romantic love. In this lesson, students will work in pairs on a guided close reading of the prologue. Once students understand how the prologue functions in the play, they will try writing a prologue sonnet to another piece of literature they have read.
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This lesson should precede the students' reading of the play and will take one class period. It's helpful if the students have previously studied the sonnet form. [Visited 11 December 2005]
After the students have read the first two acts of Romeo and Juliet, they are ready to examine one of the major themes of the play: love kills. When the students first begin the play, they think of Romeo and Juliet in terms of romantic love only, but there are many other kinds of love present in the play that often prove deadly. In this lesson students will list and define various kinds of love, examine the characters and their relationships in terms of the kinds of love they represent, and find textual examples to illustrate these kinds of love throughout the play.
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This lesson will take one block period, but may be extended.
[Visited 12 December 2005]
This lesson gives students information about the Renaissance audience's belief in dreams and uses that information to help interpret the dream imagery in plays like Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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Give each group a copy of handout 2. Explain that these interpretations were taken from Thomas Hill's 1576 The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams, written to help people interpret their dreams.
[Visited 12 December 2005]
Each student will assume the persona of a character in Romeo and Juliet and create an appropriate diary. The diary entries will reflect the character's unique traits: sex, rank, and social position, as well as personality and temperament. Through this written exploration into character, students will deepen their understanding of motivation, causality, and the conflicts within the play; they will also exercise and expand their creative writing abilities.
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This lesson stretches over the entire study of the play; it takes about ten minutes at the end of each period, plus an extra class period at the end of the unit.
[Visited 12 December 2005]
Having students create a soundtrack for the play, by picking one song to represent each scene, can help them make personal connections to the plot as well as get them motivated to more fully understand the language.
[Visited 12 December 2005]
Students will read, talk, listen, think, watch, analyze, discern, and write in order to explore the relationship between Juliet and the Nurse in Act 2, scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet.
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This lesson will take two days.
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Distribute the Handout and give your students time to answer the questions in Part I of the worksheet. Then go over the responses as a class before moving on to the "Big Question." Each student will independently state his or her own BQ. (These will turn into thesis statements as soon as they are comfortable hearing that phrase.)
[Visited 12 December 2005]
Actors need to work to understand the texts they are preparing for performance. This exercise will lead students through a series of steps to help them understand the way the language works and prepare them to perform it.
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The lesson will take one to two class periods.
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Have students do the scansion on the text
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Have students look for any images they find in the passage
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Have students go through and identify each complete thought in the passage
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Have students pick out the operative words and underline them
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Now that students have examined the text closely, have them add in the punctuation where they feel it is appropriate.
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have them perform their text for the group. Discuss the different interpretations that different text work choices can produce.
[Visited 12 December 2005]
Students will examine Romeo and Juliet in the context of three excerpts from The Office of Christian Parents: Shewing How Children Are To Be Gouerned throughout All Ages and Times of Their Life. These excerpts deal with instructions for the following: raising a daughter, raising a son, and marriage. Printed in 1616, the anonymous author of the text was codifying these mandates during Shakespeare's lifetime.
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After working with the primary source and comparing it to the play, students will write about Romeo and Juliet and either the primary source or contemporary views on raising teenagers.
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This lesson will take 1-2 class periods. [Visited 12 December 2005]
Since food and feasting are important in Romeo and Juliet , students will use the Internet and primary sources to research Renaissance food and drink. Students will compile Renaissance recipes and clip art for a miniature cookbook that the Capulets' servants could have used. . . .
This lesson will take 3 days. [Visited 12 December 2005]
Small groups of students will look at a famous soliloquy or monologue whose lines have been written on separate pieces of paper and then scrambled. As the students work to reassemble their scrambled passages, they will become more aware of sentence structure, meter, meaning, characterization, and vocabulary. . . .
This lesson will take one to two class periods. [Visited 12 December 2005]
This lesson will help students understand Romeo's confusion at the beginning of the play; students will also, through full body engagement, come to understand the text in a kinesthetic manner.
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By giving a physical representation of the words in Romeo's oxymoronic speech, students will experience the words' emotional power. Students will transform denotative meanings for each word into body movements . . .
This lesson will take one to two class periods, depending on the amount of warmup time your class needs to get them ready for physical expression. [Visited 12 December 2005]
After reading one of Shakespeare's tragedies, students sometimes ask, "Why is this play called The Tragedy of Hamlet or Julius Caesar? Why couldn't the play be called The Tragedy of Ophelia or Brutus?" In many of Shakespeare's tragedies, the secondary characters support the main character as the primary tragic figure. Or do they?
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This lesson will allow students to examine the term "tragedy". It will guide students to scrutinize each of the plays' characters and eventually lead them to discover what makes a character tragic.
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This lesson will take one to two 45-minute class periods. [Visited 12 December 2005]
This lesson asks students to interpret nonverbal clues in video productions of Romeo and Juliet in order to consider different character interpretations and uses of subtext. This lesson takes one to two class periods.
[Visited 12 December 2005]
This lesson will encourage students to think about parent-child tensions regarding obedience and communication . . .
This lesson takes one to two class periods.
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Divide students into pairs and give them the following questions to answer and discuss: Do you ever tell your parents what you know they want to hear? Ask students to jot down examples. Have you ever gotten in trouble for telling the truth to your parents? Again, jot down examples.
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Give students copies of the handout, an excerpt from Charles Gibbon's 1591 book A Work Worth the Reading . These pages will give students an idea of the deportment expected of children over four hundred years ago. [Visited 12 December 2005]
Students will read an excerpt from a 1603 primary source concerning the duties and instruction of daughters, and use this context to analyze a relationship between two women in one or more of the following plays: As You Like It, Cymbeline, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. Comparisons among a group of these plays can be especially fruitful.
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This lesson will take one to two class periods
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Divide the class into groups of five or six students. Give each student a copy of the attached primary source handout, an excerpt from Robert Cleaver's 1603 A Godly Form of Household Government. Students will use this historical context to analyze a relationship between women in one or more plays. [Visited 12 December 2005]
This unit is a useful lead-in to Romeo and Juliet, because it introduces the way Shakespeare plays with the conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet to manipulate the audience's expectations and understanding of the idea of love.
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In the sonnets covered in this unit, the form evolves, each sonnet using and developing the conventions exhibited in the previous poem. This evolution helps us understand Romeo's character, and his understanding of love and how it originated.
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This unit will take three to five class periods.
[Visited 12 December 2005]
Shakespeare tells the same story in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and Pyramus and Thisbe, only one story is tragic and the other comic. This lesson asks students to investigate Shakespeare's use of the different elements of poetry to understand how the same story can create two such different effects on an audience.
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This lesson will take one to two class periods.
[Visited 12 December 2005]