The falling action of Romeo and Juliet moves quickly but is pivotal to the play’s plot. Act 4 of this play can be read in one class period (70 minutes here at Clinton High). To ensure my freshmen students were paying attention to this important, but quick, act, I had them take Jim Burke’s episodic notes from Tools for Thought.
The episodic notes entails three parts.
- Students draw a picture to represent the six (or three, or however many you want to do) most important events, moments, or episodes in a reading piece.
- Next to the picture, they should jot a few notes about what happened (or maybe their picture covers it).
- Finally, they should write WHY the episode is important.
I discovered the WHY step most of my students didn’t do. We’ve done drawings and notes on what happened in a long story before, but I’ve never asked them to include WHY that scene was important. I don’t know if they were rushing or just plain forgot.
Anyway, the students who did all three steps really thought about the play’s events, especially Act 4. Because the ending of Romeo and Juliet is clear from the beginning and we are so far into the play, they could see why each step of Act 4 they drew out was important to the plot. They made some great inferences to the relevancy of each drawing (episode) - I’m looking forward to grading 100% quizzes tomorrow because they thought so hard about the Act.
Student samples:
“The friar is giving Juliet a potion to fake her death. This is important because this is where Juliet gets out of marrying Paris.”
“Juliet is going ‘What if?’ and worrying herself about the plan. This is important because Juliet is thinking of the ways the plan could fail, and we know it does.”‘
“This is a picture of Paris arriving to the wedding. This is important because the wedding is today and Juliet is gone.”
“Juliet is found dead the day of the wedding. Her family starts to plan her funeral. This is important because her plan is working.”
