Exploring Love and Loyalty
Romeo and Juliet

Resource Ideas

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Description

The unit focuses on two basic themes, love and loyalty. Students will explore these in Romeo and Juliet and in their own lives. While grade 9 students may know little about Elizabethan language or Renaissance Italy, they will discover that they have more in common with Romeo and Juliet than they may at first realize. They have experienced many of the same pains of growing up that the two main characters in the play do. They know what it is to be loyal to a friend, to get into fights, to care for someone who does not return that affection, to hold a grudge, to feel infatuation and first love, to tease or be teased about a girlfriend or boyfriend, and to have their parents forbid them to spend time with certain friends. Providing opportunities for students to recall and connect their own experiences and prior knowledge to what they read encourages them to find the relevance of the play.

It is not necessary for students to read every single line of the play in order to understand and explore the themes of love and loyalty, and to be effectively introduced to Shakespeare's works. In fact, changing the media through which they experience each act or scene offers variety and provides for successful learning opportunities for all students' learning styles. As the play is actually a script that was written to be performed, students need to experience the play by performing and interacting as much as possible, and seeing at least parts of it performed as live theatre or on video. Video and audio recordings help students get a flavour for the Elizabethan language as well as for the setting, characters, and action of the play. Video and audio recordings also help students to comprehend and interpret what they read.

Major Integrated Resource (MIR)

• Crossroads 9 (WCP)
  • All That I Am
    Final Frontiers
• Identities 9 (WCP)
  • Home is What We Dream
• Sightlines 9 (WCP)
  • Look (Exploring Thoughts, Feelings, and Ideas)
    Look Closely (Identity and Relationships)
    Look Back (Personal and national History)
    Look Beyond (Dream, Future,Science Fiction)

• Sample Unit - Exploring Love and Loyalty: Romeo and Juliet - The unit focuses on two basic themes, love and loyalty. Students will explore these in Romeo and Juliet and in their own lives. While grade 9 students may know little about Elizabethan language or Renaissance Italy, they will discover that they have more in common with Romeo and Juliet than they may at first realize.
• Shakespeare's England - Prior to the study of the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet, students research an aspect of Shakespearean England and present their findings to classmates.
• Romeo and Juliet - This project was designed to provide secondary English teachers with a resource for teaching Romeo and Juliet while incorporating the internet to aid in developing lesson plans and student activities. This is a PDF file.
• Shakespeare "Romeo and Juliet" - These sites focus on the play "Romeo and Juliet" by playwright William Shakespeare. Includes lesson plans, videos, a poetry scrambler, and mask designs. There are links to eThemes Resources on Shakespeare's life and "Drama for Students."
• Romeo and Juliet - This supplemental unit was developed as part of the Schools of California Online Resources for Educators (SCORE) Project by teacher Joel Littauer. Complete with teacher's guide and 3 student guides, this unit was designed for use with 9th grade English classes. The exercises encourage students to acquire, organize and transform information into a composition that deals with the relationship between character and plot in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
• Mr. William Shakespeare - This site offers users "a complete annotated guide to scholarly Shakespeare Resources", as well as the newest playwrights material available on the Internet. There is a timeline, a genealogy, a biography, and several other extended resources

Web Quests

• Rewriting Romeo and Juliet - Students rewrite a scene from Romeo and Juliet and create a Theatrical Porfolio.
• Romeo and Juliet Web Quest - This WebQuest was developed for the Reavis High School Freshman Connections program as an interdisciplinary study of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the Renaissance. The WebQuest incorporates language arts, math, science and literature. There are tasks for each of these disciplines and it is intended that a group of four students work together on the project.

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