Rashomon Lesson Plan

Act it Out! Monologue to Dialogue

Kind of Activity:

Role Play

Objective:

To practice acting skills; to reimagine this story as a play

Common Core Standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.6

Structure:

1. “Kesa and Morito” is structured as two subsequent monologues, a literary device usually seen in plays rather than in short stories (for example, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech is a well-known monologue).

2. Divide students into groups of two and tell them to reimagine this story as a dialogue between the two characters in a play, rather than as two monologues in a short story. This means that students will have to work to restructure the monologues (cutting and pasting lines,...