Romeo & Juliet Lesson 1: Shakespeare's Life and Times - PowerPoint

The inaugural lesson on Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' focuses on developing students' research skills, with an emphasis on Shakespeare's life and times. The objective of the lesson is to teach students how to research quickly and effectively. To begin with, students are encouraged to brainstorm various sources of information, such as television, the internet, newspapers, museums, radio, magazines, YouTube, DVDs, people, and books, and then consider which sources would be most appropriate for the topic at hand. The lesson proceeds to share strategies for finding information swiftly, suggesting the use of contents pages, index pages, search engines, scene selection buttons, the Dewey Decimal System in libraries, and consulting experts such as librarians.

Students are then introduced to the concept of skimming and scanning text as efficient methods of extracting information without reading every detail. Skimming involves reading quickly to get a general idea of the content, while scanning is glancing over pages to find specific keywords related to the topic. Highlighting key terms is also recommended as a technique to help remember where vital information can be found. In a practical application of these skills, students are given a brief biography of William Shakespeare and asked to use differently coloured highlighters to distinguish between details of his personal and professional life. The lesson concludes with a plenary session where students share and discuss their findings, explaining how they determined whether the information pertained to Shakespeare's personal or professional experiences.