The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "All's Well That Ends Well" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
In this lesson, students examine several speeches from William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. Students track the occurrence of speeches, monitor what kind of speeches are made, and write about what the speeches reveal about their speaker.
The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "As You Like It" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "All's Well That Ends Well" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was the hub of a rich civilization that dominated the region of modern-day Mexico at the time the Spanish forces arrived. In this lesson, students will learn about the history and culture of the Aztecs and discover why their civilization came to an abrupt end.
By exploring historical accounts of events surrounding the Boston Tea Party, students learn about the sources and methods that historians use to reconstruct what happened in the past.
In this writing lesson plan, students write about the events of Romeo and Juliet and try to figure out their root causes. Students can take a number of approaches, each of which includes summarizing the events of the play and finding evidence to support their interpretation of the causes of the events.
In this lesson, students work cooperatively to analyze the title characters of Romeo and Juliet. Students look for citations that help develop their characters, then write character analyses.
The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Comedy of Errors" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
This lesson looks at Thomas Paine and at some of the ideas presented in his pamphlet, "Common Sense,"Â such as national unity, natural rights, the illegitimacy of the monarchy and of hereditary aristocracy, and the necessity for independence and the revolutionary struggle.
In this lesson, students engage in a choral reading of Shakespeare in an effort to better understand his works. By reading rearranged character lines - sometimes out of context - students see new sides to characters in Shakespeare plays they have already read.
The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Coriolanus" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Cymbeline" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
The 11th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 11th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Students move from learning the class rituals and routines and genre features of argument writing in Unit 11.1 to learning about narrative and informational genres in Unit 11.2: The American Short Story. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.
This unit uses William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing as a vehicle to help students consider how a person is powerless in the face of rumor and how reputations can alter lives, both for good and for ill. They will consider comedy and what makes us laugh. They will see how the standards of beauty and societal views toward women have changed since the Elizabethan Age and reflect on reasons for those changes. As students consider the play, they will write on the passages that inspire and plague them and on topics relating to one of the themes in the play. Finally, they will bring Shakespeare’s words to life in individual performances and in group scene presentations.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Students read Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing .
Students read two Shakespearean sonnets and excerpts from an Elizabethan morality handbook dealing with types of women, and they respond to them from several different perspectives.
For each work of literature, students do some writing. They learn to write a sonnet; create a Prompt Book; complete a Dialectical Journal; and write an analytical essay about a topic relating to a theme in the play.
Students see Shakespeare’s play as it was intended to be seen: in a performance. They memorize 15 or more lines from the play and perform them for the class. Students take part in a short scene as either a director or an actor.
GUIDING QUESTIONS
These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.
What are society’s expectations with regard to gender roles?
Does humor transcend time? Do we share the same sense of humor as our ancestors?
How do we judge people?
How important is reputation?
BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT (Cold Read)
During this unit, on a day of your choosing, we recommend you administer a Cold Read to assess students’ reading comprehension. For this assessment, students read a text they have never seen before and then respond to multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The assessment is not included in this course materials.
CLASSROOM FILMS
The Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing is available on DVD through Netflix and for streaming through Amazon. Other versions are also available on both sites.
In this lesson, students will revise the final couplet of their sonnet, learn more about the characters in Much Ado About Nothing, and begin their Dialectical Journal. Finally, they will use their developing understanding of iambic pentameter to analyze Shakespeare’s language choices.
In this lesson, students will finish Much Ado About Nothing and see whether their predictions for how things end are correct. They will also complete their Character Chart and weigh in on what they think the topic and the theme of the play are.
In this lesson, students will come to see how the concept of deception can be looked at in more than one way and how this factors into Much Ado About Nothing ’s character development.
In this lesson, students will take a closer look at the villain of this play. Is Don John really so evil? Has evil been done to him? Then they’ll learn about Dogberryisms and see whether they can interpret some of them themselves.
In this lesson, students will continue reading Much Ado About Nothing aloud and then compare and contrast the directorial choices made in two staged versions of act 2, scene 3.