Sunday, October 5, 2008

Feuds: Skills vs. Content, Montagues vs. Capulets

I'm beginning Romeo and Juliet tomorrow. I haven't written the unit plan yet, because I need to turn it over in my head a little bit. I'm partially following the Shakespeare Set Free Romeo and Juliet unit - one of my joys this summer at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute was working with that unit's author, Sue Biondo-Hench - but need to add some writing components.

My big goal, though, is something that I had an epiphany about in the first or second day of the institute: I need to make sure my students take from this unit the skills to approach their next Shakespeare. It's not about them knowing the story of Romeo and Juliet; it's about them gaining the skills of comprehending the language of Shakespeare (or anything else tough they encounter).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you have the name of the website where the teachers post lists of what they need for their classrooms and people donate money to them for those items?

Teach Baltimore said...

I think the website you are referring to is http://www.donorschoose.org.