Don't let the fact that you haven't spent years as a high-school English teacher deter you from enjoying Shakespeare at home with your children. It's fun, and with the help of modern technology, it's easier than you think.
You can read about our Custom History Curriculum
and our 17th Century World History Curriculum
to understand how we learn at our house. Here's how we're learning Shakespeare at home.
Start with a little research on his life.
William Shakespeare- 1564-1616
I am not ashamed to recommend Wikipedia for a starting point. It gives a basic overview as well as rabbit trails to follow. Parents, if you need a refresher, now's the time to get it: Shakespeare Wiki
Now, I introduce the Bard to my kids.Shakespeare’s Life and Times Activity Book is a great place to start. I haven't used this particular book, but I have several others in the series. They are thorough and fun!
For daily lessons, especially for junior high and up, I recommend Shakespeare Lesson Plans
at About.com/Education. These are free and can be done in a few minutes per day. Paired with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(online at Many Books), or your own copies of the plays, a nice overview of Shakespeare's plays and how they are written can be achieved.
But how do you bring these famous works to life?
For the older students, I recommend these books, used in the following order:
**The Shakespeare Encyclopedia
by A.D. Cousins
Shakespeare Plays with modern translation series
The Encyclopedia has a great overview, plot, character map, description of themes, and lots of color photos from live plays and movies---for each play! Using a copy of a play with a side-by-side modern translation makes all the difference. Try to read through one full play, and then watch a live version of that play, or at least a movie (check YouTube and Amazon Prime). When done in this order, it's less painful, and might really hook your students!
Many famous actors (especially the Brits) have done Shakespeare on the stage, and you can find videos of them online. Ian McKellan (Gandalf) did many, So did Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tenant, as well as Alan Rickman (and here he is reciting Sonnet 130
on YouTube). Find an actor your students like and use that to get them excited.
Visit The Royal Shakespeare Company
online for information, education, and history of the company. It's pretty fascinating!
For younger students, I'll follow the same method, but on a smaller scale. They'll have another chance down the road to cover this on the high-school level, so I'm not worried if they don't watch and read an entire play.
**Illustrated Stories from Shakespeare by Usborne
**Great Scenes from Shakespeare’s Plays
(Dover Coloring Book)
The Play’s the Thing
3 Free Illustrated Guides to Shakespeare
Tales from Shakespeare
by Charles and Mary Lamb (I've heard great things about this but haven't read it)
The Shakespeare Stealer
is a great historical fiction, and all of my kids loved it. A Shakespearean Tale
is perfect for the younger kids! My 10 year old read it to himself before I could read it aloud!
What it looks like at our house
After introducing a play in the above manner(s), I'll give the kids a chance to color from the Dover Coloring Book (all of these coloring books are amazing!) while I read aloud from our fun books. The kids will have assigned reading from a play (or illlustrated book of plays) on their own time. Some days we will watch a video from the lists above. We generally spend an hour on this.
My kids love to act, and (as I mentioned above) get to work with Mrs. Cranfill, a graduated homeschool mom, history teacher, and playwright. Shakespeare is a natural study for budding actors and actresses! Imagine my homeschool-mom-nerd-overload when Mrs. Cranfill invited us to take part in a local series of presentations on Shakespeare's life and plays -- right when we were doing this study! Talk about immersion! So, all of mine have been memorizing facts about Shakespeare and lines from his plays, and presenting them on the stage. Oh, if only every study ended this way!
Naturally, we had to have costumes, and since I like to sew (and now my 15 year-old does, too), we got busy with these patterns: