Romeo and Juliet Lessons That Make Close Reading Manageable

While there are a few other viable contenders, you could make a good case that Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate “I read that in high school” text.

And why not? Romeo and Juliet lessons are bound to spark at least a modicum of interest in our students; after all, the play is about teenagers who fall in love at first sight and die tragically after a whirlwind romance that takes place amidst a bitter family feud. If that doesn’t pique your interest, not much will.

But getting through that drama-filled story of star-crossed lovers takes a lot of work. Understanding Shakespeare is challenging for most people, and we often have students who lack the stamina to follow along as we translate every line of the original text. We need Romeo and Juliet lessons that will engage students who live in a TikTok world, full of less-than-a-minute videos optimized to catch their attention.

When we set out to create our Romeo and Juliet lessons, our primary goal was to build a unit that didn’t require us to walk line-by-line through the entire play but still provided students the opportunity to engage with Shakespeare’s rich language and experience the classic “must-read” scenes.

With this goal in mind, the “stars” of our Romeo and Juliet lessons became five close reading activities, one per act, that provide scaffolds to help students parse Shakespeare’s language before creating a fun “product” that demonstrates their understanding of the scene. And we are so pleased with the results!

If you’re looking for a similarly balanced approach for your Romeo and Juliet lessons, one that provides opportunities for students of all levels to approach the text with a balance of both independence and support, we hope you’ll keep reading to find an idea or two that work for you and your students.

Let’s Get Started: Setting the Stage (So to Speak) for Our Students

We like to start any Shakespeare unit with some background information on Shakespeare, in part to ease our students in and prepare them for the challenge, in part because it seems like students should add at least a few nuggets to their cultural toolkits, and in part because we’re English majors who find it interesting!

But after a few too many years of watching our students’ eyes glaze over as we went through our standard “Introduction to Shakespeare” PowerPoint, we knew we needed another approach.

We created an Introduction to Shakespeare Escape Room where students team up to complete five tasks to “rescue” Shakespeare, who has been taken hostage by a rival company from the Rose Theatre, learning about his biography and Elizabethan theater along the way.

We also engaged students in a close reading of Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) to get their feet wet interpreting Shakespeare’s language in an informal, non-threatening activity, one that required them to get through only 14 lines instead of more than 3000. Students very often misread this poem, so there’s always a fun “So that’s what he’s saying?” moment when they “get it.”

Finally, we’re big believers that when it comes to Shakespeare and struggling readers, it’s essential to spoil the plot. When our students have their work cut out for them understanding the language, it’s helpful to send them in with at least a rough idea of the basic storyline.

For Romeo and Juliet, we gave our students a simplified retelling of the story broken into ten sections. Small groups of students were assigned to turn one section into an emoji story (only emojis and punctuation allowed, no letters or numbers). The next day, after showing students a three-minute video summarizing the full story, we showed them a scrambled up version of the emoji story and assigned students to race to put them back in the correct order. The winning class earned extra credit participation points (our go-to prize).

Guiding Students Through the Reading

We mentioned earlier that we didn’t want to walk our students line-by-line through the entire text. We did, however, want them to read the full story, and we knew they would need support in doing so. Our way of approaching this was to create guided reading questions intended to help students pick up on key points throughout each act. Because we’d be asking them to do a lot more heavy lifting in our close reading activities, we made these multiple-choice questions (which also made scoring much more manageable for us).

This worked well for our PreAP students: we played the audio of each act of the play, and they were able to answer the questions as they listened. Our preferred translation is always the Folger Shakespeare Library (we love their gloss).

For our standard-level students, however, our go-to lifesaver is Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories. Garfield has written a prose version of many of Shakespeare’s plays that is rich in figurative language and uses lines from the original play for all the dialogue. Each story is approximately 12 pages, and it allows us to cover the full play (and still require our students to read) without totally losing them in the challenging language.

Some teachers look at us a little askance when they learn of this approach, but hear us out: this is challenging for many of our students. Too many of our English Language Learners (ELLs), special education students, and below-grade-level readers don’t stand a chance of decoding any of Shakespeare’s work on their own; Garfield’s text provides an accessible challenge, one they have hope of meeting. 

The Heart of Your Romeo and Juliet Lessons: Close Reading Activities

When it comes to lessons that make close reading accessible for a wide range of students, our Romeo and Juliet lessons are our pride and joy.

We selected one scene (with the exception of Act 3, which absolutely requires two) from each act and created a graphic organizer in which the text is divided into chunks and paired with questions carefully crafted to help students paraphrase the lines. We assigned the lines to pairs of students (our class sizes meant each pair of students got 2–3 chunks of lines) and had them work together to determine, to the best of their ability, exactly what Shakespeare was saying in their assigned lines.

After students had time to work, we had them share out their paraphrases, going over each one and making corrections as needed. We created a Google Slides presentation to go with it that includes (often humorous) images that further help students to understand Shakespeare’s meaning.

Once we were confident that students had a strong understanding of the scene, we assigned them a writing task (some more formal, some more creative) to demonstrate their understanding.
What scenes did we assign? you might be wondering. We selected what we thought were the five most key scenes to understanding the motivations behind key characters’ actions throughout the play, preparing students for their final essay.

This was too much close reading for our standard-level students, so we pared it down to the two we thought were most essential: Act 2 and Act 5. We also added an additional layer of scaffolding by providing cloze responses to help them paraphrase their assigned lines. This approach made it so that even our below-grade-level readers could experience some success with Shakespeare’s challenging language.

Writing the Essay: Lots of Blame to Go Around

From what we can tell, we’re not alone in asking our students to write an essay analyzing who or what is most responsible for three deaths at the end of the play. But it makes sense that this is such a popular writing prompt: all the events of the play work together to create a tragedy that very much could have been avoided. No one character bears sole responsibility for what happens, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

For our standard-level students, we gave them a list of characters and circumstances that could be considered to have played a role in the deaths at the end of the play and asked them to choose three and explain how those characters and/or circumstances contributed to the deaths. While we asked them to indicate which they thought was most responsible, the emphasis was on explanatory writing.

As always when teaching writing to our standard-level students, we provided several scaffolds: sentence-by-sentence instructions and sentence frames to help students focus on what to say rather than feeling overwhelmed because they didn’t know or didn’t feel confident about how to say it.

For our PreAP students, we gave them more flexibility: they could choose the 1–3 character(s) and/or circumstance(s) they felt were most to blame for the deaths and support their selection in an argumentative essay. Because we taught this to 9th grade honors students, we still provided sentence-by-sentence instructions since we wanted them to learn how to construct an essay with an appropriate balance of evidence and commentary, but these directions were more general and did not include sentence starters.

Wrapping Things Up with a Final Exam

We ended our 5–6 week unit with a final exam that included a combination of multiple-choice and matching questions. The questions covered key dramatic devices, character identification, quotation identification (PreAP only), and reading comprehension, with a heavy emphasis on the close reading scenes. It was a nice way to hold students accountable for the unit, and most of them did well on this final assessment.

We love teaching Shakespeare to a wide range of readers and finding ways to help even our struggling students engage with and enjoy Shakespeare’s stories. We had so much fun creating Romeo and Juliet lessons that allowed our students to understand and ultimately express their (very strong) opinions about this classic.

If you’re interested in the approach we’ve taken (and, more importantly, in saving yourself hours of prep time), you can purchase the full unit, complete with answer keys, scoring guides, and materials for both standard-level and PreAP students. We’ve also bundled the unit with our Introduction to Shakespeare Escape Room (and Sonnet Activity) and separated out the five close reading activities for teachers who already have a go-to unit but are interested in incorporating more close reading.

Please reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to let us know how it goes!