I am by no means an expert on Shakespeare, so I was a little intimidated to to tackle this unit with my children. I kept it simple - very simple. I found some great ideas, resources, and notebook pages over at Jimmie's "Shakespeare for Children" Squidoo lense and I highly recommend it to anyone who would like to dive into Shakespeare with their children.
I went to our library and began searching for books we could use for our study. We read "Bard of Avon" as our biography of Shakespeare.
My son read "Twelfth Night" independently, and then gave an oral narration to his sister and I so we could all learn more about the play. We also watched an animated version of this play. Again, thanks to Jimmie's Squidoo lenses, I was able to find this amazing kid-friendly resource! 
My daughter, K, read "The Winter's Tale and did the same thing as her brother. She gave us an oral narration of the book, and we watched the animated version. 
On the left you can see my son's favorite scene from "Twelfth Night" was the sword fight. My daughter's favorite scene from "The Winter's Tale" was when mother, daughter, and father were all reunited at the end. 
We also did a timeline notebook page, a notebook page to record a short bio report for Shakespeare, and we had a lot of fun doing a "words coined by Shakespeare" notebook page. This notebook page is also one of Jimmie's creations and can be found over at her website, "The Notebooking Fairy. Click here to read more about the words coined by Shakespeare. Some of our favorites were watchdog, wormhole, and leapfrog. All other notebook pages we used can be found at Jimmie's "Shakespeare for Children" Squidoo page. Like I said, we kept things simple. We went to the library and checked out some books and read them, watched some animated tales, and did some notebook pages, and had a lot of fun learning about Shakespeare together.
Here are some of the other books we used:
How about you? Have you studied or plan on studying Shakespeare with your children?
2 comments:
Hi Nikki, I've been surfing around blogs today and I can't remember how I even found you. Wait --- I think you are the Blog of the Day? Is that how this happened? Anyhow, I was glad to see your Shakespeare story and thought I would share about what my son and I are doing. We follow Ambleside Online and so have been reading the stories from Lamb's Tales from Shakepeare. We also have watched the BBC Animated stories when we can. A few times we have also read picture books of the play. As we're reading along we draw stick figures to represent people and events and places in the story. Shakespeare plots can get a bit convoluted, you know. We posted a portion of James narrating "Cymbeline" at our blog. http://www.kaypelham.com/2011/02/25/james-explains-shakespeares-cymbeline/
Wait wait wait wait! I just remembered why I ended up at your blog. You visited ours today, right? Mentioning James' Shakepeare video reminded me that you commented on his Caravaggio video. I've got too much going on. We're about to take a loooooong road trip and I'm packing and having to take school things because we still have two more weeks to complete. I reached for our Tales from Shakespeare and said, "Oh, better take that because we have a play to read." To which James said, "Oh, good!" (and genuinely meaning it.) Not something you'd hear from most soon-to-be 8 year old boys, I guess. Glad your kids are enjoying Shakespeare also.
Thanks for the links. There is so much to Shakespeare that it's hard to keep it simple.
We recently saw Sprite's first live Shakespeare performance. She loved it. I am so glad it was a positive first experience.
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