Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Act V

For Act I

For Act II

For Act III

For Act IV

Romeo and Juliet Act V, Scenes I-III

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

The children completed watching Romeo and Juliet on a road trip with their father on the Saturday.

Readers’ Theater

As another means of drilling the story deep into the children we carried out a reader’s theater performance of Act V.  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 V from the actual play we needed to read scene eleven to scene nineteen from the book above.  This takes us to the end of the play in this book which means they do not cover Act V:

 Making Up Words

Did you know a lot of the words and well known phrases we use today have their origin in Shakespeare’s head?  Yes, if he didn’t quite have the right word to express that which he wished to express he made one up!  I knew I was brighter than my school teachers thought I was….One of the most common remarks left on my work during secondary school was ‘This word does not exist!’  If only they knew…..

I had the children view this Horrible Histories video.  And then another.  Always a good laugh!

I read out a few sayings of Shakespeare and some of his made up words, particularly focusing on Act IV.

Then I wanted them to write a paragraph each containing at least three made up words and one made up phrase.  They then needed to read it out and we all had to try to figure out exactly what was being said in the paragraph:

It was weird just how hard this was for everyone.  It must be so ingrained to only use accepted words, that the idea of actually creating their own was almost beyond their capability.  The girls (twins) had already made up one word in their time as twins.  We don’t allow arguing or bickering in the house.  The girls assure me, though, that they never argue, they only disagrin.  This is apparently nothing like arguing, more twin disagreeing with a grin 🙂

Project Based Learning

We decided to cut today short.  I think a lack of interest in the play and tiredness from the previous week’s work had created some very lethargic children.  Lorna and I felt it was best to step in and cancel the rest of the day and rest well over the weekend so we could come to it fresh Monday morning.

Shakespeare Film Night

Each Friday evening we had planned on having a Shakespeare Film Night.  Although we had shortened the day, my guys found relaxing to this film in the afternoon a perfect remedy to their lethargy and they all enjoyed it very much in deed!

This saw the finale to our week studying Romeo and Juliet.

We will be focusing on our projects for our very own production of Midsummer Night’s Dream which is coming up very shortly.