Shakespeare Week

I gave myself a challenge of doing a Shakespeare week with my students. I thought it would be good to put on my resume and a challenge for the kids.

Older Group-4-5^th

I tried to find ways to simplify the language or find some sort of Shakespeare for kids book. I found one on Amazon but I didn’t want to pay for it. So I decided to just throw them into the Shakespeare deep end with the original language and see how they did. I put together two short scenes, one for the girls and one for the guys. The guy’s scene was from Romeo and Juliet. It was the few lines right before Mercuito is stabbed. I told them the basic storyline up until that point. The scene that I printed out had the original language and modern translation off to the side to help them. I read it with them and went through what each line meant. Then I had them read it and act it out. Some of them did remarkably well with the language. Other struggled, which I expected but I give them props for trying. There was not too much grumbling or “this is so boring.” All the boys wanted to be Romeo even though he doesn’t actually fight in this part of the scene that I gave them.

The girl’s scene I picked was from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a Helena/Hermia scene at the beginning of the play. Midsummer is one of my favorite Shakespeares, but probably because I was in it in high school. But I realized that Midsummer is a very confusing play. So I only explained the Hermia/Lysander and Helena/ Demertius part of the play. And only how it begins, the love triangle at the beginning is hard enough to understand. I bribed them with candy to answer questions about what they remembered from the play and the scene they practiced. One the third day of going over these scenes I gave them the challenge that if they could memorize one of the long lines in one of the scenes I would give them a packet of Oreos. And believe it or not, in a 30 minuet class, I had one student who memorized Mercutio’s “Good King of Cats” line. I was very impressed.

I think if I were to do it again I would want to find something that just had parts of the real language. It was cool to give them the whole scene in the original language so that they really got a feel for the poetry, but reading an entire scene for some was a bit painful. It was hard to get to the acting part because there was so much focus on just reading the words. But it was my first time teaching this and I was impressed but what they could do and their attitude toward it.

The little guys K-1, and 1-2

I debated for a long time doing anything Shakespeare with the little guys. I wanted to do something from Midsummer because fairies seem exciting and enchanting, but Midsummer is just too complicated. When going through the plays, most Shakespeare’s plays are not exactly “G” rated content. I finally settled on The Tempest because it has dog chase scene, magic, and fairies. I found a book in the library that was kind of like comic book Shakespeare. But because the pictures where small I decided to just find some clip art for each character and tell them the story through like little story board. Shakespeare’s characters have very difficult names. I was really impressed by their ability to remember almost all the names. I think the visuals really helped. The first day I told them the story using the clip art of the different characters and the next day I asked them questions about the story and who ever answered correctly got to act out the play. It went pretty well except they hate the Miranda and Ferdinand getting married part. It’s the least amount of love story I could find in a Shakespeare comedy.

Overall it wasn't perfect Shakespeare week but they got some exposure and it was good practice for me as teacher to see what worked and did not work.