Petrarch and Shakespeare

I didn’t start Shakespeare until fourth grade…then we listened to the re-tellings in story form from both Beautiful Stories… and Tales from…. After that we read it aloud (or listened to the librivox recording while following along in the book). If I could find a good, decent version of it (like older BBC productions) then we watched it. That is what has worked for my family, so far. SCM recommends 1 Shakespeare play every other year, and I believe that AO recommends 3 plays a year. IMO, some of the themes might be a little much for younger kids.

If you are referring to Plutarch, I am waiting until high school for the original version, but there are really good retellings of those too, and would be appropriate about 4th grade as well. You might look at the samples online at Amazon, mainlesson.com, or Heritage History to get a better idea of what your family needs or will enjoy for the Plutarch versions.

AO, which we use, recommends beginning both at Year 4. AO “Years” don’t necessarily correspond to grade levels, but I think probably the average age for a Year 4 student may be around 10 years old, give or take a year or two. Tackling Shakespeare and Plutarch at that level also assumes that the child has been handling challenging literature for several years already, so I would wait longer than that and build up to the challenge if they haven’t (for example, a child who has just been pulled from PS or switched from a textbook/workbook curriculum at that age, rather a than a child that has been doing a CM-style curriculum with high quality literature all along.) We haven’t gotten there yet as my children are still young, but my dd is on track to do AO Year 4 when she is in 5th grade (she’ll be 10, turning 11 in the late fall that year).

Jen

We start both these at about age 10.  We had read the retellings of the major plays earlier than that, but started reading real plays and doing real Plutarch then.  (Incidentally, Petrarch is fine to read too—makes a great study to contrast his sonnets with Shakespeare’s!)  I do recommend Anne White’s guides at first.  You will eventually get beyond them but by then you’ll be able to do the same thing yourself.  I know people see these as “hard” and kind of as “extras” but the benefits are really, really big on these, for a small time investment.  

I also agree with bookworm. We read retellings of Shakespeare early on and add the actual plays starting at around age 10 or so. We use the side by side versions by Shakespeare on the Double, I think. We watch animated Shakespeare tales on youtube when we are done. Love Lamb’s Shakespeare tales and also Lois Bennet’s Shakespeare Can be Fun for Kids. We love these books. All ages join in for this, leaving the reading of the actual play to the olders – about seventh grade for us. We try to watch a real play usually on dvd or youtube of each one that we read. My aim is one per term, but I feel like we have still achieved much if we get in two Shakespeare plays a year.

As far as Plutarch. I found a Dryden version in hardback at an antique store many years ago for about $5! It had stampings in it that it was used in public school in the 1940’s! Wow! So we use Anne White’s guides and sometimes read from the translations for kids recommended on AO as well as the original.Only 10 year old’s and up for these. I only get through one or two lives a year. It is a challenge, but very interesting. This is what our founding fathers read! Give it a try.

It’s interesting what I can think of at 3am after a couple of hours sleep and then a kid wakes me up – my mind starts spinning and I can’t go back to sleep!! Argh!

I don’t think that I’ve ever heard of the Home Educator’s Tutor, but it sounds great. I am going to look it up.

I made copies of the Lamb’s book and Beautiful Stories from Librivox and we listen to those. I have both books, but there is something there that makes listening to them on Fridays during lunch doable. 😉 I even found A Comedy of Errors on librivox the other day, so we listened to it while we read the play.

There are several re-tellings of Lives on the HH site – 3 in the Ancient Greece library and 2 in the Ancient Rome library.