Lesson Redesign

Original Lesson Plan 

Curriculum Expectations 
Understanding form and style: recognize a variety of text forms, text features, and stylistic elements and demonstrate understanding of how they help communicate meaning 
Speaking to communicate: use speaking skills and strategies appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

Homework questions (10 minutes): All questions assigned for act 3, scene 2 are due today. Go over answers to questions with class to assure everyone is comfortable with the answers. Assign each question to a student to write on the board.

Reading in character with teacher “think aloud” method (45 minutes): Act 3, Scene 3 and 4 will be read aloud. Scene 3 is only 3 pages long, but exposes key elements of guilt from Claudius, as well as the plot to send Hamlet to England. This is also the first time that we see a soliloquy from someone other than Hamlet. In Scene 4, Hamlet talks with his mother, catches Polonius eavesdropping and kills him. The discussion of the treatment of women, madness and eavesdropping will be prominent. Teacher will prompt students with important quotations, significances, and character developments. Students will be assigned parts to perform/read and props will be provided to add to scene. Teacher will prompt students with important quotations, significances, and character developments. Students will be assigned parts to perform/read and props will be provided to add to scene. Scene three requires five actors to play the King, Guildenstern, Rosencrantz, Polonius and Hamlet. Scene four requires four actors to play Polonius, Hamlet, Queen, and the Ghost.

Movie (15 minutes): Teacher will show clip of Act 3 Scene 3 and 4 from the Kenneth Branagh version of “Hamlet”. This particular version follows word for word from the text. In addition, a play is intended to be acted out, thus by just reading aloud the students sometimes miss important details.

Redesigned Lesson Plan Ideas

Looking back on this lesson, I really do not think that I gave enough time to these two important scenes. Scene three is crucial because it is the first time that we are confirmed that Claudius did, in fact, kill his brother. Scene four is the epic moment where many people argue Hamlet loses control of his sanity. I decided if I could resign the lesson, I would split it into two lessons (if time allowed me to). The first day I would use a Soliloquy Mash-up (explained below):

Soliloquy Mash-up (remainder of the class and into the next):  The task is for the student to have lyrics that relate to revenge, fear, duty, murder or selfish motives available for this class time.
Option one: Students would have been prompted the class before to bring lyrics from home. Teacher should always have backups in case students forget.
Option two: Students are taken down to the computer lab to find lyrics on these themes.
Option three: Teacher pre-selects these lyrics for the class.
The teacher will create this experience in the English classroom by having students merge the soliloquy and one song lyric of their own choosing in order to create a new “mash-up” of two different genres. 

The students will be directed to alternate between one lyric from their song of choice and one lyric from Claudius’s soliloquy.
**The students are responsible to take home their creation and post it to the classroom blog to showcase their talents. The following class, the students will have to present their creation, which can be pulled up easily on the classroom blog.

I also would like to integrate twitter to enable students to tweet from the perspective of any character in the play. I remember doing a creative writing exercise with my Writer’s Craft class in grade 12 that asked us to write a paper from the perspective of one of the characters. I think that this activity would be beneficial for the students to connect with a certain character.  

I would need to have a class (or two) to set up all of these social media sites and always provide step-by-step instructions to help the students.

I would like to note that the majority of my lessons did incorporate media because I felt that a lot of physical understanding is lost when you read a play. I would always show the clip of that scene from the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet.  My students really enjoyed this method and I would always compliment this method with a comparison of play to video after the clip.