OK. If your oldest are 9 and 6, then I think I'd stick with the adaptation stories. Beautiful Stories is a good start. My own kids sometimes got lost with Beautiful Stories--I think they maybe shorten too much. We used Lamb's version oftener, and sometimes Leon Garfield's. But Beautiful Stories is a good place to start with. If you are interested, I used to have a site that took the illustrations from Beautiful Stories and had them as coloring pages for a notebook. We usually read ones like A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, etc, as good first experiences. Many families like Midsummer Night's Dream but you really need to help your kids keep everyone straight--we used a whiteboard, lol, about who was currently in love with whom. Beautiful Stories has some good helps in it, like a bio of Shakespeare and a pronouncing guide for the names. I also own a book called Shakespeare for Dummies that is a good quick reference for information on a play. One glance at the info in that and you'll know for sure ones to avoid, like The Merry Wives of Windsor--don't go there, LOL. Finding good screen versions of plays is hard. I haven't perfected it yet. There are "reviews" of screen versions of a few plays in a book aimed at high schoolers, called Brightest Heaven of Invention, that are somewhat helpful but most of the plays there you won't be doing for a while (Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet--not really grade-school-level material.) We have tried out tons of plays on Netflix (dh and I ALWAYS watch it first!) and have found two main groups--the uniformly objectionable (too much attention on the bawdy) and the badly done (poor video work, poor sound, hard to follow a "stage play" that someone pointed a video camera at) There are a set of cartoon versions of the plays which some families love, but we thought they were awful. We have had better luck finding performances of plays to go to. We've had some GREAT experiences with that. The guy that does Homeschool Radio Shows used to sell a set of things that had some old audios of radio shows of the plays--we liked those pretty well.
Well, I'll check back in later with a few more ideas--need to get the kids started!
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