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A Midsummer Night's Dream – Unit Plan (Grade 9)

November 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

With the Stratford Festival’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was a great year to teach this unit. Interweaving the text of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the graphic novel Bone and the fantasty novel Ysabel, the lessons reinforce previously learned reading strategies. The main text, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is approached primarily as an oral and dramatic text, and students are regularly enacting parts of the script.

  • Level: ENG1D (Grade 9 Academic)
  • Timeframe: 21 classes, including a test period

Unit Outline

  • Lesson 1: Introduction to Fantasy (3 periods)
  • Lesson 2: Introduction to Shakespeare & A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2 periods)
  • Lesson 3: Acts 1-3 (6 periods)
  • Lesson 4: Memorization, Vocabulary, and Recital (3 periods)
  • Lesson 5: Acts 4-5 (1 period)
  • Lesson 6: Theatre Education Project (5 periods)
  • Lesson 7: Written Review (1 period)

The unit outline [PDF] includes a summary of curriculum expectations plus a sample calendar.

Lesson Plans

Unit lesson plans [PDF] provide detailed steps to covering each of the unit topics, relating them to the corresponding expectations and teaching strategies.

Assignments

Multi-Media Presentation (40 marks)

Students develop and deliver a presentation to educate younger students about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including a visual aid, a brief discussion, and a dramatic scene using the original text OR an audio recording of a scene scripted into a different genre. Students are evaluated using the theatre education activity rubric.

ThinkBook Written Review (15 marks)

Students answer one of three options, commenting on their reading experience of Ysabel.

Bone Dialogue and Dramatic Script (10 marks)

Given images from Jeff Smith’s Bone, students imagine possible dialogue for the characters, then transform the dialogue into a proper dramatic script.

Passage Memorization (10 marks)

After repeated practice together as a class, students memorize and recite a passage from 2.1 (Fairy’s lines 30-40; or Puck’s lines 42-58; or Oberon’s lines 253-263).

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Image by Niffty..

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Field Trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival: Midsummer and J. Caesar

October 18, 2009 By 1 Comment

caesar_lgLast week our English Department took a bus load of students to Stratford, Ontario for an afternoon performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and an evening performance of Julius Caesar. This was our fourth trip in the last three seasons, previously introducing our students to performances of King Lear, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Macbeth.

Once again we stayed at a downtown hotel, and once again the trip went wonderfully. This annual field trip is one of the best opportunities for high school students to enjoy a fun, educational experience and has led to a Shakespearean-Renaissance at our school. The drama club is thriving and has been putting on productions of plays based on Shakespeare’s works, and the Shakespeare units are generating the most interest and excitement in our English courses.

What worked well … Superb acting!

While all of the positive things that I mentioned last year continue to ring true (location, price, an optional trip, and relevant texts), this trip really highlighted the excellent acting that we continue to enjoy at Stratford. Some highlights:

  • Ben Carlson: What can I say? Ever since we saw him in Hamlet, our school has been a big fan. This time he made an excellent Brutus; so into his role that, from the audience, we could see the wheels turning as he considered necessary action.
  • Tom Rooney: While the students loved his role as Puck, I was especially impressed with him as Cassius (which in itself highlights his versatility). This was the first time, for me, that Cassius seemed calculating, persuasive, and human, and not simply a lean, hungry, sinister, Alan Rickman-like bad guy.
  • Michael Spencer-Davis: A perfect Casca.
  • Cara Ricketts: A perfect Portia and the best Hippolyta to date. Lots of fire.
  • Yanna McIntosh: Wow! Wow! and Wow! She was the highlight of Macbeth in the Spring, and she was one of the greatest highlights again on this trip. As Titania in the afternoon and as Calpurnia in the evening, she gave such bold, solid performances.
  • Geraint Wyn Davies: Wonderful! Nick Bottom in the afternoon, making me laugh at his every turn, and Julius Caesar in the evening, holding the audience in awe. Finally a Caesar strong enough to be a ruler, strong enough to be stabbed by all of the conspirators before falling, and only succumbing because of the pain of Brutus’ betrayal.

What needs work

  • If you read my blog post about Macbeth in the Spring, you know that I’ve been disappointed with some of the ‘bells, gongs, and buzzers’… more cameras and TV screens?! more helicopter sounds?! costuming that spans 2000 years?! Please, please, please… just give us some classic Shakespeare for a change. If William Shakespeare really is timeless, if he really is for all ages, then we don’t need these extra gimmicks.
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Introducing Shakespeare with graphic novels

March 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Last semester I happened to land upon a great tool for introducing Shakespeare to Gr. 9 students, thanks in part to inspiration from a colleague in a course I was taking at the time. Graphic novels help students to understand how dialogue works and provide a basis for reading a script.

I chose to use this approach in a unit that incorporated A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We began by reading excerpts from Bone (by Jeff Smith) as a class, discussing what elements made it fit our definition of fantasy literature. Next, I gave students copies of some pages in Bone with the dialogue erased. Working alone or in pairs, students created the dialogue that they imagined could work for those characters. From there, students translated their dialogue into script form and presented it.

The fantastical Bone was a perfect lead-in to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our conversations often included some comparison of the setting of the two texts.

This semester, I’m hoping to use Julius Caesar as the primary Shakespearean text for this class. It’s challenging, though, to find a graphic novel that works really well with this play. I’ve considered Beowulf, another text based in an ancient world, but there’s very little dialogue in Beowulf to work with. Characters proclaim their thoughts, which are then interpreted by the narration.

An old-world graphic novel? I must do some hunting.

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