Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Act III

 

For Day 1 see here

For Day 2 see here

We did things back to front today as Lorna was at the fracture clinic in the morning, AND I had the two littles.  I decided to do project time in the morning with a complete run through of their version of Midsummer.  If nothing else it showed me who needed help and what needed to be done.  I was surprised at how good it all was.

Romeo and Juliet Act III, Scenes I-V

Watch a Stage Production of Act III, Scenes I-V 

Readers’ Theater (30 mins)

As another means of drilling the story deep into the children we carried out a reader’s theater performance of Act III.  This particular rewrite leaves a lot out but focuses on key scenes.  The scenes do not correspond with the actual scenes in the play.  To cover Act III from the actual play we needed to read scene ten to scene thirteen from the book above:

• Scene Ten: Romeo kills Tybalt

• Scene Eleven: Nurse tells Juliet that Romeo has been banished for killing Tybalt

• Scene Twelve: Romeo discusses his future with the Friar

• Scene Thirteen: Romeo spends his wedding night with Juliet.  Juliet realises if she is to be with Romeo she must achieve this on her own

Improvisation Activity (30 mins)

• Story theater 

This is similar to reader’s theater (where players are given an unseen script and they act it out without props, costumes or sets), but with story theater each part is assigned to two players instead of one.  I thought this time I would use a modern translation.  I had them do a story theater improvisation of Act III beginning of Scene V  One player reads out the play and the other acts it/mimes it.  I don’t know if the pictures show it but the ones acting relied waaaay more on their body because they had no voice.  The gestures and faces were exaggerated:

Literary Analysis (20 mins)

• Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is a literary device used to prepare the reader or audience for an event to come.  It has a couple of roles to play within literature and these are as follows:

1. Foreshadowing adds drama by building anticipation, suspense and tension with regards to what will happen next in a narrative.
2. Foreshadowing also prepares the reader for something which might be unbelievable or fanciful had the text not hinted at it happening before it does.

O God, I have an ill-divining soul!
Methinks I see thee, now thou art below,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb:
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look’st pale.

(Juliet III,v)

Or if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.

(Juliet III,v)

The children studied the foreshadowing examples written above and we discussed how Shakespeare used foreshadowing to give the reader a hint of what was coming up in the play.

Break for lunch

Shakespearean Insults (30 mins)

Shakespeare is kind of renown for his insults.  I found a couple of videos which showcased some of them:

We then used this insult kit and divided into children and Lorna into two teams.  One team pretended to be the Capulets (they wore the Shakespeare T shirts) and the other team were the Montagues (they didn’t wear the t-shirts):

Each team was given one minute to hurl the worst insults they could come up with at the other team.  I judged which was the most insulting team:

The Montagues went first and did a sterling job at hurling insults.  The Capulets literally just stood there and took it:

The Capulets went next and whilst they did a great job also, it was the Montagues who surprised us all by responding so enthusiastically:

It was a no-brainer, the Montagues won, hands down!

West Side Story

I was really looking forward to having the children watch this, and C had been nagging for weeks!  However, it was not all I thought it would be with moans about the acting, the singing, the story line…you get the picture.  I’m not even sure they finished it.

This was the day everyone began to look really tired and lethargic.  We were already going to have Thursday off, but you could really see we all needed some down time to relax and not think about Shakespeare.  My three and I completed the Act III work on Wednesday evening so we could have a whole day off the next day.  I will post on that tomorrow.