December 2010
Gregg Long teaches English at Lake Park High School, Roselle, IL
Plays/Scenes Covered
Twelfth Night, 1.1.1-15
What's On for Today and Why
This series of 4 lessons gives students the opportunity to explore and interact with Shakespeare's text by creating skits. The four part series can be summarized as follows:
Day 1-students produce skits based on specific words as pre-reading activity
Day 2-students read and analyze text
Day 3-students use a scene to redub non-Shakespeare video excerpt
Day 4- students redub their original skits using specific scenes from Twelfth Night
The initial lesson will help the students prepare for the study of Twelfth Night by having them create short skits that will later be tied into the whole play. This experience should make the play more accessible and will help identify some of the key concepts explored by the text and the characters in the play.
The first lesson will take a 45 minute class period, and will extend into homework or additional time in class to complete a short video.
What You Need
Folger edition of Twelfth Night
Available in Folger print edition and Folger Digital Texts
Digital recording technology/cell phone cameras
What To Do
1. Have students make cluster maps using the following pairs of words:
Love and Rejection
Loss and Hope
Sloppy and Foolish
Quarreling and Pleading
Clustering is an activity where students will brainstorm ideas, images and feelings around a stimulus word or concept. As students brainstorm material, they get their creative and intellectual energies channeled and active, which gives them a larger word bank for writing. It also gives them a means by which to recognize patterns in their own thinking.
2. Divide students into small groups and assign each group a pair of words as above. Using as many words of the words as possible that they clustered, have each group put together a short dialogue/scene. The subject for the scene should be the following:
- Love and Rejection: someone wants something from someone else
- Loss and Hope: someone decides to do something
- Sloppy and Foolish: several old friends meet up after a long time
- Quarreling and Pleading: someone is introduced to someone else
3. Have students perform and record their dialogues-high performance equipment is not necessary. Cell phone cameras will suffice as long as overall dialogue is clear and finished product is retrievable. Superior quality may be obtained using Audacity oriMovie software.
4. Have students complete scenes for review with class the next day to disuss subject and word choices.
How Did It Go?
Were basic instructions followed? Were students able to generate enough words to construct a scene? Did they understand the concept of creating cluster maps?Did students work together and focus on the specific themes?
If you used this lesson, we would like to hear how it went and about any adaptations you made to suit the needs of YOUR students.
