Lesson Title: East Meets West -- William Shakespeare Meets Matsuo Basho

Grade Level/Content Focus: 7th Grade / English / A Midsummer Night’s Dream & Haiku

Time Period: 2 (This would not include background work done prior to the lesson: reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, introduction of Haiku, part of the first quarter MCPS 7th Grade English curriculum.)

Standards:
3.7.1.7 Analyze the author’s purposeful use of language in literary texts.
4.7.2.1 Write to express personal ideas using a variety of forms including poetry, drama, narration, and personal essay.

Objectives: Students will recognize and understand passages related to nature in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Students will understand the concept of compression represented by the Japanese poetic form, haiku.
Students will create haiku that reflect both a specific speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Japanese poetic format.

Vocabulary/Concepts: Haiku, Elizabethan England, Tokugawa Japan, Shakespeare, Basho, kigo, supernatural, compression

Materials/Resources:

• Text Sources: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (student and teacher); The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Haas, 1994, The Ecco Press (teacher): A Haiku Garden, by Stephen Addiss with Fumiko and Akira Yamamato; illustrated edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream if available;
• Web Sites - When I put “haiku” into Google, I was told that there were 1,520,000 possible websites! http://www.toyomasu.com/haiku is one site that I explored that seemed appropriate and informative.
• Student worksheets: hand-out on Haiku; worksheet to select relevant passages from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Videos: Shakespeare, The Animated Tales: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (as seen on HBO) – This could be used to see how the animators visualized some of the nature-filled passages; variety of videos on haiku.

Lesson Abstract: Having studied and written haiku in the first quarter and having just completed reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the fourth quarter, students will bring the two cultures together. Their task will be to identify speeches in the play that focus on nature, reread and experience them as if they were going on a nature walk. Then they will compose one or more haiku that capture a moment within the context of the speech.

Lesson Development:

Motivation/Warm Up
Activate prior knowledge by reviewing what students remember about haiku. Perhaps have students get the haiku they wrote at the beginning of the year and share them. Brainstorm similarities they can identify between England and Japan. Provide simple background information on Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Basho (1644-1694).

Modeling
Have students turn to Act II, scene 1, lines 81-117 ; look at lines together, extract essence that might be captured with specifics in haiku

Strong spring whistling wind
Across the margin of sea
Shouts our discontent.

Guided Practice
Form groups and have students select together passages that might work; have them brainstorm the images and the focus they might use in writing the haiku; have them write one haiku together.

Independent Practice
Write one haiku independently; share with group; critique and edit.

Assessment
Prepare a presentation of the Shakespeare speech and an extracted haiku. Make clean “beautiful” copy of passage; include short explanation of what is happening and how it relates to the plot of the play and of the original haiku.

Closure
This might work well done as oral presentations in groups. Many possibilities.