Introducing Twelfth Night & Act I, Scene I

This is our daily warm up, wherein students work with two or three Latin roots per day.  The resource that I use to get my roots is Perfection Learning's Everyday Words from Classic Origins.
Every day, when the students arrive, I have two Latin roots on the SmartBoard.  Their job is to generate as many words as they can that contain the roots, and they try to guess what the root means.  After I give them about five minutes, we share words and I tell them what the root means.

The students compile these daily activities in their class journals.  After every twelve roots, they take a test on the roots themselves and a set of words that contains them.

To kick off this, our second Shakespeare of the year, I show the students this Twelfth Night Introductory Power Point that I pulled together from a variety of sources.  [Please note that the Folger has the best Shakespeare resources; if there is a good idea in this lesson, you can bet that it came out of a Folger class that I took many years ago, or I read it in a Shakespeare Set Free book or online.]

So, we talk about what to expect in the play, Twelfth Night and I "talk up" all of the fun we are going to have. Though it is not a new movie, many of my (female) students have seen "She's the Man," so they have some idea of what the plot is all about.

While I am talking, students take notes on the characters and say smart things like "Oh, Malvolio.  Remember there was a Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet?  And bene means good and mal means bad? (Thank you, Latin root study!) 

 After I introduce the play, we watch this video of one version of Orsino's speech.  Then, we read it in the book, along with the rest of Scenes 1 and 2, and discuss them to makes sure everyone "gets" it.