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Reading Shakespeare’s Plays
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So how do you do it? I am talking the actual plays not Lamb’s Or Nesbit’s.
Do you each take parts and read them? Do you act them out with stick figures or flannel boards? Do you take parts and act out the play yourselves?
I look forward to hearing how others fall in love with Shakespeare.
We ordered parallet texts of Shakespeare from Rainbow Resources and it was a wonderful experience. My daughter has already requested another Shakepeare play for next year!
Parallet texts have the orginal old english text on the left side of the page and a modern english translation, word for word, on the right side. She was able to easily follow the story this way and truly enjoyed learning.
Usborne has a beautiful book of S stories and she read that version to familiarize herself with the play. Then we made a poster that had all the character’s names on it and how they were “related” to each other in the play. Then we read the parallel text, then I borrow a dramatization of the play from the libarary and we listened to the performance. She followed along in her text. I would even find her reading from it when we were finished with the play.
Shakespeare is wonderful for children to learn. I hope your children enjoy it!
We’ve done all of those things. We have one son who really prefers just to sit and read out his part. (There are usually only 3 or 4 of us who do this at once–we often wait until Daddy gets home so he can play the bad guys–he’s really good at that! I have to do all the women’s roles because none of my he-men will do them, no matter what actors had to do in Shakespeare’s day! LOL) I have one son who can’t quite restrain himself from getting up and acting out a little as he does it. I often use some kind of visual aid for the complicated plays, like Midsummer Night’s Dream or Comedy of Errors, so we can keep everyone straight. Stick figure drawings with labels work for us. Also, I have somewhere a relatively child-friendly list of videos that I’ll try to remember where I got it from–seeing one can also be a nice touch. So can listening to one, and I have several dramatizations on audio.
We have some of the No Fear parallel texts—but DO NOT give them straight to your children! Some of them give very inappropriate modern-language “interpretations” of certain parts. *I* keep ahold of that version, sharing info from it as needed. Also, we just don’t stress over every word. If we are getting the main gist, we don’t stop until someone asks us to, then we get straight what is necessary, and go on. Analyzing every word is a real enthusiasm-killer!
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