Using Cyrano de Bergerac to facilitate meaningful classroom conversations
Looking for a super engaging unit of study that is guaranteed to be the highlight of your school year and a moment in time that your students will come back to comment on? Well, look no further. Cyrano is your lesson, especially if your students are taking a world history class!
Cyrano is great because it is a play that has something for everyone from fighting and wars to love, romance, and humor. Cyrano is that original (OG) play that so many modern day movies and TV shows are based on.
In our Teachers Pay Teachers Cyrano unit, we focus on a lot of modern day issues from how the world perceives beauty with a lens that focuses on gender and race, violence and revenge in society, when is it okay to lie, the correlation between wealth and happiness, the power of words and language, and is love at first sight possible. As you can see, Cyrano makes it easy to have rich, deep, and powerful conversations on topics that really matter. Our students get super into these class discussions, and they are changed for the better after having read and experienced the lessons provided when reading/acting Cyrano together as a class. We also focus on all of the literature standards because they are all in this powerhouse of a play.
We hope that you will check out our unit on Cyrano. It is one of our favorites, if not our very favorite unit that we teach with our students. In fact, our students would say the same. They always mention reading Cyrano when they come back to visit us. That is why we save it for the end of the school year. People always remember what happens at the end and that is why we like to end the school year with the themes and ideas of Cyrano.