Twelfth Night Unit Shakespeare: Act 1 to Test | No-Prep Worksheets & Answer Keys

Want to teach a Twelfth Night unit that will get your students engaging independently with the text, making connections to contemporary issues, and excited to discuss essential questions that really matter?

Shakespeare's themes of gender roles, bullying, messages, love, class, and drunkenness make Twelfth Night a play that is especially timely today. But if you want your classes to get excited about reading this challenging text, your students will need to be excited to delve into the book and feel empowered to tackle the difficult language on their own. You’ll also need to help your classes to make connections between their own lives and those of these fictional characters from so long ago.

When you follow the step-by-step methods that I outline here, your students will learn to understand the language and appreciate the artistry of the play and ultimately, to understand their own lives a little bit better.

This seventy-eight page guide to Twelfth Night has been honed over many years of teaching. It includes twelve classes' worth of no-prep questions for every scene. It also includes instructions for using this guide with interactive notebooks, a quiz on acts I and II, a test on the whole play, and a final collaborative creative writing assignment with instructions and a rubric for grading presentations.

Every day’s lesson teaches a manageable portion of the play and includes prompts for writing that will engage students and get them thinking about the deeper questions of the play.

All of the answer keys quote the important passages, so there is no guessing on your part as to which parts of the text are most important. When you discuss the questions with your classes, you can point them to the sections to make sure that they are engaging with the text and working to interpret the sometimes challenging language.

There are no lectures or power points here—students will do the work themselves, with guidance from their teacher. Rather than telling them what the play means, you will be empowering them with the confidence and skills to tackle a Shakespeare play on their own.