Lesson Plan – Romeo 6
Subject: English I Honors
Objective: Students will write a Shakespearean sonnet.
Concepts: Sonnets, poetry,
Materials: Sonnet 29, Romeo and Juliet in The Language of Literature, love songs on tape, sonnet
worksheet,
Strategies: Lecture, modeling, guided practice,
Announcements:
Lesson Presentation:
Journal #
- What is your favorite love song? What is it about the song that you enjoy so much?
(Have love songs playing as students enter.)
Discuss journals.
Tell students that love poetry has been around for centuries. Shakespeare was an expert at love
poems and refined the art of the sonnet as a love poem. Put Sonnet 29 on the overhead and go over
the poem. Have students try to interpret what it says.
Point out the rhyme scheme and the A B A B . . . C C format. Tell students that they are assigned to
write a love sonnet following the rhyme scheme. Have them begin and tell them it is due tomorrow.
Read for Romeo and Juliet to the end of the period.
Evaluation: On-task behavior and quality of poem.
Comments:
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29
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
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Build Your Own Sonnet
The sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem in predominantly iambic pentameter, with a formal rhyme
scheme. Although there can be considerable variation in rhyme scheme, most English sonnets are
written in either the Italian (Petrarchan) style or the English (Shakespearean) style. A third sonnet
form, the Spenserian sonnet, is also well-known, but far less commonly used than either the
Petrarchan or the Shakespearean sonnet.
You may want to use Shakespearean words like: thee (you), thou (your), thy (your), doth (does),
hath (has), whilst (while), art (are), 'tis (it is), 'twas (it was), ye (you).
You might want to start with a question on the first line, as Shakespeare often did.
In each square, write only one syllable!
Line #
1
Rhyme
Scheme
A
2
B
3
A
4
B
5
C
6
D
7
C
8
D
9
E
10
F
11
E
12
F
13
G
14
G
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