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Lesson plan that all of this goes with:

Text Review: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! //Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!// is a book about a Renaissance town and the townsfolk lives. It gives many different stories of the people's hardships and an idea of what role each character played in the town. This book is full of monologues which is perfect for this unit. Commedia Dell'arte is a Renaissance theatre art form and this book is full of character from that time period. The point of this book is to help the students find the stock characters.



Commedia Dell'arte Masks
When talking about commedia dell'arte one cannot forget the masks. Each mask is a stock character in the show. The stock characters are always known for the kind of mask that they wear. An example is the doctor mask which always has a long hooked nose. The masks are used to help the actor get into the character. Each stock character has a certain trait that goes with them and the mask that they wear.

Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia Dell'arte
This book is about the style of commedia dell'arte, specifically movement. It give a good description of the typical movements used by the actors portraying the characters. In the lesson the movements used help the students find their character. Movement helps with their writing by making the students think outside the box. They have to figure out how to describe the movement they are making as that character.

==Character Development from the Inside Out == This book gives advice on how to create a character that catches an audience's attention. Morgan's focus is specifically writing characters for novels. He describes the beginnings of a character through self-experience all the way to how they are built and move physically. This is how actors find their characters. In the lesson the students are moving, however they are moving in character by mentally taking Morgan's advice.

Tips: Ideas for the Actor
Overall the book gives, as the title indicates, tips for actors. Tips for studying a text, techniques used, movements in a space, no-no's, building a role and more. For this lesson I focused on the comedy section, due to the nature of commedia dell'arte. It gives advice on killing the laugh, holding for the laugh, how to setup, tell and react to the joke, adjusting comedically, slap-stick comedy and comedic timing.

Web 2.0 Tool Review:

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Kids' Vid : This tool gives instructions and tips on how to make a video for a class production. This would be great for my unit. The students can use this tool to make a script,as well as film and present their script as a dvd for the class. This tool also has videos made from around the world, giving the students other ideas on what to do.=====

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Big Huge Thesaurus : A wonderful tool for writing. It gives the students many words similar to the word that they are using. It allows for the student's vocabulary and understanding of a word's meaning to be enhanced. This tool gives them so many different kinds of words that either hence the meaning of their sentence or saying it in a different way. In this lesson the tool would be used to find different ways to describe how a character is moving and speaking.=====

Web Resources:

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The stock characters and the basics of Commedia dell'arte are given in a very good description.

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This also gives a description of the stock character, but it also gives modern day examples towards the bottom of the page.

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Jim Carrey is an actor that uses his face as his masks. Each face that he "wears" is like another character, he is a comedic actor who uses masks like in commedia dell'arte.

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Very well known group of comedians from the early to mid 1900s, the Marx brothers. Their background is in commedia dell'arte, that is the style of all of their movies. This is just a scene of improvisation from one of their films.

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This is a collection of questions that writers and actors ask when making a character.