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Recommended for YA / High School. Mature Content.
Today is Mean Girls Day, October 3, and I made a downloadable set of Reading Roles pages for a high school classroom reading of Ian Doescher's Much Ado About Mean Girls, which is basically the flick in iambic pentameter.
If you haven't gotten your principal's permission to teach this, seen the film, or sent home a parental permission slip offering to send students whose parents object to a colleague's classroom, you should before you start.
But oh, I can just imagine the fun a 9th grade classroom would have with this!
Introducing Iambic Pentameter with Much Ado About Mean Girls
Lesson Procedures:
- Buy class copies of the book. This sounds like a no-brainer, but each student needs to have a book in their hands to follow along. You also need to have the movie to watch, either through iTunes or however you buy movies for your classroom.
- Start by printing the Two Line Start Cards and laminating them, one set for each pair.
- Cut them up and put them in baskets on pairs of desks.
- Allow students to pair up or assign partners.
- If your class has already done the Two Line Start Cards for my lesson using Ian Doescher's Verily a New Hope, they'll know what to do.
- If not, have them watch Akala's TedX talk about the links between HipHop and the Bard. Have a copy of the Sonnet #18 ready for them to read and follow, as well as the lyrics to Akala's two songs at the end. Then crank up the volume! The kids love them.
- Then students practice reading the Two Line Start Cards to each other.
- Students use a dry erase marker to write in the breaks between syllables and show the accent in the pairs. TW circulate, checking to make sure students are placing the syllable breaks and accents in the correct places and that students "get" the poetry form.
- When they're familiar with the form, students begin reading the book and watching the movie.
- Keep track of which students read which parts using the Reading Role Sheets.
Your students will marvel at how closely Doescher follows the movie script!
