March 27-28: Verily, A New Hope, More Shakespeare Prep

Today, we did the following:

1. FEAR Time.

2. Renaissance Dissiin’ (Shakespearean Insults) – Distributed a handout for students to create three Shakespearean insults or compliments.  Be sure to follow the directions and be ready to pick a partner to insult!  We lined up across from one another to hurl our insults one by one, one insult at a time.  We handed this in for PARTICIPATION CREDIT.

3. Verily, A New Hope – Students watched the famed Cantina clip from Star Wars IV, viewing Han Solo’s entrance.  We then read the same scene re-written in Shakespearean style with students volunteering to read the parts of Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Luke Skywalker.  We followed up with a discussion on the ability to understand what was going on.

4. Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene 1 – We read up to Prince Escalus’s speech declaring everyone to depart.

March 23-24: Intro to The Most Excellente and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet

Today, we did the following:

1. Students received a half-sheet handout with four questions.  Students answered the first question only regarding their comfort level of reading Shakespeare.

2. Romeo and Juliet Prologue – Students received copies of the Prologue.  Students followed the directions on the back of the paper.  Students chose who was ‘A’, who was ‘B’.  The A’s read the Prologue to the B’s starting with the first line, however, the B’s took over reading aloud the prologue at the second line, alternating back to A’s for the third line, back to B’s, and so on until the Prologue was finished.  Students switched roles, re-read the Prologue aloud to each other.  Then students were asked to re-read it aloud but superfast.  We reflected on the experience with a short follow up discussion about trying to understand it.

3. Shakespeare in His Time – We read a handout with interesting bits of factual information about what the everyday English citizen experienced during Elizabethan England. Again, A’s read each paragraph aloud from the front side of “Life in the 1500s”, while alternating with B’s who read aloud each paragraph on the backside of the same page.  Students were asked to mark which paragraph they found the most interesting/disgusting/mind-blowing and shared it with the class.

3. Shakespeare in Our Time – Watched a video that illustrates how Shakespeare has been adapted to fit the needs and interests of students of today (the clip is truncated at a little over 16 minutes):

4. We handed in the half sheet for PARTICIPATION CREDIT!