Hey everyone!

Hope that your school year is finishing up nicely with lots of wonderful plans for the summer! As you may have noticed in the our latest newsletter, I had an article published in Seasons magazine last month. Thought I'd give you all an idea of what it included. If you'd like to read the article in its entirety, you can check out the Seasons website at www.ripe4harvest.com for their subscription information.

Many blessings,

Beth

Excerpt from Beyond the Textbook:

Some parents are intimidated by planning a unit study because they worry about getting it right or coming up with ideas.  Literature offers some natural leads for planning a unit study because so much of the material is built right into the book.  Using literature as the basis for your unit study also provides immediate structure.  It leads to not only the study of the content, but also to the elements of literature (plot, setting, characters, etc.), learning about the author, analyzing the theme(s), researching the time period of the setting or the when the book was written, vocabulary and more.  Literature is also an easy segue to oral presentations and narrations.

Shakespeare, often studied with older students, naturally lends to unit studies.  Although it is wise to be selective about the work you choose by this profound author as some of the mature themes should not be studied too early, one work that has much to offer is The Merchant of Venice. With any literature based unit study, you can develop components to be completed before, during and after the actual reading.  Some ideas that work well to do before reading include: 

·        Study the time period of Shakespeare (late 1500s – early 1600s, Elizabethan England)

·        Discuss anti-Semitism during Shakespeare’s time (could expand to examine other historical periods that reflect anti-Semitism),

·        Geography lesson about Venice (a financial capital during Elizabethan times),

·        Define “irony” in preparation for finding examples of it in the play as it is read

·        How to read a Shakespearean play for greater understanding (read it like poetry, to the punctuation symbol, not to the end of the sentence).