Kasic

Berthoud High School

Pre AP English 9

Unit: Shakespeare and Love

Day: 8 Queen Mab and Annotations

CCSS Standards:

2.1.f. By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and
poems, in the grades 910 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the
high end of the range.

2.2.a. Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text,
including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective
summary of the text.

Learning Target: To analyze the Queen Mab speech and practice annotation skills that will help
us read the rest of Act 2 and all of Act 3 over spring break.
Success Criteria: Annotate and discuss the Queen Mab speech.
Warm Up: (10 minutes)
Quote of the Day:
Look back on your notes on the clip we watched yesterday of the balcony scene, write down how
that interpretation of Romeo and Juliet differs from what you expected/the pictures you saw in
the textbook.
Students write for 5 minutes and then discuss for 5 minutes. Includes Learning Target/Success
Criteria and To Do slides.
Establish Skills (10 minutes)
1. What is the context?
2. What do I already know?
3. What is the tone of this piece?
a. How do you know?
Hopefully students remember talking about how the speech moves from light to dark.
4. How can we break up this speech to make it more manageable?
Divide script with students, and then count off per the number of parts they separate the speech
into.
Individual Practice (12 minutes)
8 minutes to look over their piece of the script
4 minutes to discuss with others who have the same part
1. What words are you unfamiliar with? Are they defined for you? If not, look them up.
2. What is the tone of your section
a. How do you know? (2 more reasons than stated in class)
3. Who is being described?
4. Who is Queen Mab bringing dreams to, and what do they dream of?
Discussion: (17 minutes)
1. Share summary of annotations for each pat (1 minute per group)
2. Romeo says: Dreamers lie in bed asleep while they do dream things true.
What does Romeo believe about dreams?
Romeo is a dreamer. He is idealistic (quickly and deeply falls in love) and as we have seen with
Rosaline tends to pine after what he cannot have.
3. Mercutio says: I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle (lazy) brain, begot (born)
of nothing but vain fantasy, which is as thin of substance as the air and more inconstant
(unpredictable) than the wind...
What does Mercutio believe about dreams?
Mercutio thinks dreams are useless, and distracting. He portrays Queen Mab as at best a
mysterious/mischiefs character and at worst almost a temptress.
4. Why would Mercutio tell such an unbelievable or imaginative story about dreams to Romeo?
What is he trying to convince Romeo of?
The goal of the outing is to cheer Romeo up. Mercutio starts out playful and move into darker
subjects. He is worried about his friend and wants him to return to reality, but he gets distracted
with his own problems as the speech grows darker.
Numeracy: Go over how to cite lines of poetry in MLA formatting. Have students pick a line that
they found interesting, and practice citing it. Each student will need to count the lines of the
speech to find what number they need to use to indicate their line.