Goals

Students will fully understand all parts of the character they are interested in analyzing and "becoming" on stage by completing the following tasks:

 

Details

Duration: 120+ minutes

Assessments: Student writing, Performance/presentation (i.e. speech, play)

 

Description

Students needed to complete 3 tasks for this section: (a) a character analysis, (b) find quotations from the play about their character, and (c) complete a costume design.

a. Character Analysis - Students answer the character analysis questions in bullet form. Be as detailed as possible. (1-2 sentences will not suffice.) SEE RESOURCES

b. Self-Statements - Students find quotations from the play that show both true and fictitious character traits. They must have a total of at least 12 statements, selected from all acts of the play. Try to find 4 per category.
o Statements that you say about yourself that are true
o Statements that others say about you that are true
o Statements that you say about yourself that are false
o Statements that others say about you that are false
SEE RESOURCES FOR AN EXAMPLE

c. Costume Design – Students create a costume for the character using the 9 head fashion figure template that they will learn about after the visit from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise. SEE RESOURCES

9 headed figure template
model template...
Download (66K)

Character Analysis Questions
Download (34K)

Costume Design Model
Download (380K)

Self-Statement Examples
This is a model of student work, but it is not from Othello....
Download (133K)

Author Reflections

This step was relatively straight-forward. I encouraged students to be creative when answering the character analysis questions, as long as they were staying true to their character. For example, they may not have all the "answers" to the questions, but they can imagine/create responses based on what they know of the character's thoughts, actions, etc. Students are used to hunting for quotations to use as evidence in literary analysis essays, so they understood the purpose of this task. The costume design section allowed artistic students to excel and learn about color use and costumes from another time period, which was new for them.