At the moment at Ticking Mind we’re working on a student edition of Romeo and Juliet called: Shakespeare’s Tragedy Romeo and Juliet and How To Write A Truly Impressive Essay On It. You can see the cover here:
Like our other student textbooks, this one seeks to explicitly break down skills for students and scaffold them to practise these skills. One of the skills our book is focusing on is close reading – getting students to actually understand the language and imagery of Shakespeare, not just the plot. To scaffold students to do this, we’ve broken each scene of the play into small, digestible chunks of around 26 lines. Each of these passages appears on one page, introduced with an overview of what happens in the passage and followed by some analysis, often with engaging visuals. The brevity of the passages means we can read through it multiple times with students – once for an overview, twice for meaning, a third time for analysis. Since an important part of close reading is annotation, on the left hand side of each passage is room for students to take notes. One of the ways they can take notes, is by looking at the icons which mark our areas of a passage which include instances of imagery. Students need to identify and comment on the specific words themselves. You can see an example page here:
These are just some of the features of the book. To find out more, including how the book scaffolds students to write about the play, come along to our upcoming, free book launch in Ringwood and Northcote (details of the Ringwood session here:How to teach students to do truly amazing writing in response to Romeo and Juliet: Book launch – Ringwood and of the Northcote session here: How to teach students to do truly amazing writing in response to Romeo and Juliet: Book launch – Northcote). You don’t need to be considering purchasing or book-listing the textbook to get value out of the book launch. As with all our workshops, this one will include lots of practical resources and ideas for how to teach Romeo and Juliet in a meaningful way.