It is a ninth grade interdisciplinary unit on Elizabethan England and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet for English, art, and computer classes. Basic skills and communication are addressed through reading, writing, and history. Math skills are addressed at a very minimal level in the unit as students comprehend the historical timeline. Students write summaries of these topics.
Students also act out a scene from the play for videotaping.
Finally, they convert their essays into Hyperstudio presentations and post the presentations along with selected video clips on a class designed web site. Basic skills and communication are foundation skills for this unit. The pieces of information extracted during the inquiry segment become building blocks for students to later write their essays and compose their Hyperstudio presentations. Problem Solving presents itself in a variety of tasks. During the first week students solve the problem of using various search engines to find web sites about their historical topics.