Part of Prufrock's new series for the upper level classroom, Advanced Placement Classroom: Romeo and Juliet is a user-friendly guide to teaching one of Shakespeare's classic plays. Featuring more than 50 reproducible pages to supplement student projects, debates, and writings, this guide teaches students to consider new perspectives on the traditional tale. Teachers can implement day-to-day study of the play with intriguing journal prompts, introduce challenging critical thinking with lessons that put Juliet's nurse and Friar Lawrence on mock trial for their role in bringing together the lovers, and much more. Prufrock's new line of innovative teaching guides is designed to engage students with creative learning activities that ensure Advanced Placement success. The Teaching Success Guide for the Advanced Placement Classroom series helps teachers motivate students above and beyond the norm by introducing investigative, hands-on activities including debates, role-plays, experiments, projects, and more, all based on Advanced Placement and college-level standards for learning. Grades 7-12

By using the concept of differentiated instruction, the authors provide a practical, easy-to-use guide for teaching the play that addresses a wide range of student readiness levels, interests, and learning styles.

"Cohen has made an essential classic cool."—Beth Kephart "Juliet Capulet would find a worthy BFF in Beatrice Bunson."—Cordelia Frances Biddle High school begins, and to Beatrice Bunson nothing is the same, not even her best friend, Nan. The "new" Nan doesn't hang out with Bea after school; instead she's running for Student Council and going to parties and avoiding Bea at lunchtime. The boys who were gross in middle school have become surprisingly polite, while the "cool" kids are still a mystery. Bea's older sister, meanwhile, acts like she's living in a soap opera. On the bright side, there's English class with Mr. Martin, where Beatrice discovers that Shakespeare has something to say about almost everything—and that nothing in life is as dramatic as Romeo and Juliet. But when Nan gets in over her head in her new social life, it's up to Beatrice to restore her reputation—and she may need to make a few new friends to pull it off. One of them, the slightly brainy guy that Beatrice meets at her grandmother's retirement home, is definitely kind of cute, and probably dateable. (Fortunately, nothing is the same in high school.) As Beatrice and her classmates tackle Romeo and Juliet, they unveil the subtleties of the play as well as broader lessons of love, family, honor, and misunderstandings. Guided by Mr. Martin, these ninth-graders help us to understand Shakespeare, as Shakespeare helps them begin to understand themselves. "Beatrice Bunson's Guide to Romeo and Juliet whisked me straight back to my own high school days, when I read Juliet beside a Romeo I'd long blushingly admired. Shakespeare was talking to me, I was sure, but I wasn't always precisely sure what he was saying—a confusion I would have never experienced had I had this smart, tender story within a story at hand. Explicating the secret codes of heady teen romance with as much sagacity as she deciphers Shakespearean sonnets and wit, Cohen has made an essential classic cool."—Beth Kephart, author of Going Over, One Thing Stolen, and This Is the Story of You "Paula Marantz Cohen hits all the right notes in her charming, wise and heart-stirring tale of teen angst, young love, betrayal and loyalty. Beatrice 'Bea' Bunson makes a spunky heroine, a member of the 'smart set' who's too self-deprecating to recognize her worth as she navigates high-school cliques, family dramas, and not-so-secret crushes. Reading Romeo and Juliet for an English class, Bea ponders the weighty issues of honor and courage, and then finds those forces impacting her life. I couldn't help but picture Juliet time-traveling to a 21st century teen environment—and then went one step further and imagined Shakespeare's young heroine coping with tense school lunches and clandestine beer parties. Juliet Capulet would find a worthy BFF in Beatrice Bunson."—Cordelia Frances Biddle, author of the Martha Beale mystery series "This is a charming book. The story of Romeo and Juliet intertwines with the more comic vicissitudes (SAT word) of Beatrice Bunson's first year in high school. Paula Marantz Cohen clearly knows both Shakespeare and ninth graders. Warning to teachers of high school Shakespeare classes: be prepared to revise your lesson plan."—Gillian Murray Kendall, professor of English Language and Literature (and Shakespeare scholar), Smith College "What's the best way to deal with high school drama? Apply the problem-solving strategies of Shakespeare…Cohen offers up lessons of theory and language while engaging her readers with enjoyable characters who find themselves entangled in Shakespearean plots that must be unwound with compassion and insight…Her discussions of plot, language, and thematic elements will serve young scholars better than SparkNotes. Ideal for those who are charmed by the romance of Shakespeare. And who isn't?"—Kirkus Reviews Paula Marantz Cohen's novels include Suzanne Davis Gets a Life (Paul Dry Books 2014), Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death and the SATs, and What Alice Knew. She teaches English at Drexel University.

Teaching guides and lesson plans designed to make classic literature engaging and relevant to today's students! This comprehensive book of lesson plans, projects, discussion questions, reproducible worksheets, and more provides teachers with everything they need to engage middle- and high-school students in the study of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Each SparkTeach Guide includes: * Dozens of lessons and contextual "Real Life Lens" discussion prompts * "Big Idea Question" prompts, activities, and projects that explore the work's key themes * Poetics lesson plans * Film comparative lesson plans * Exercises in studying the play's use of metaphor, simile, personification, and motifs * Lesson plans for differentiated instruction * Reproducible worksheets and lesson assessments that build reading, vocabulary, and comprehension skills * Answer keys * Student rubrics There are also tips for class planning and management, ideas for personalizing content, Common Core references, and more, making this the perfect resource to engage students in literature study that's meaningful, exciting, and above all, FUN.