You Can Teach Shakespeare to Children

Shakespeare for children?!  What a lofty idea.  Yet Cass Foster and Lynn G. Johnson have found a way that not only teaches young minds about The Bard, but engages them while doing it too!

Shakespeare To Teach Or Not To Teach: A Teacher’s Manual, can be used with elementary to high school students, and is suitable for use in classroom, drama club and homeschool settings.  Teachers and parents need not be anxious over teaching Shakespeare anymore.

Shakespeare To Teach Or Not To Teach, can be used in conjunction with any Shakespeare play, but works very well with Shakespeare For Children: The Story of Romeo and Juliet or one of the six productions in the Sixty-Minute Shakespeare series.

Beginning with basic information of Shakespeare, the time period (both his plays and when they were performed), what took place on and backstage in The Globe theater, To Teach Or Not To Teach puts the teacher at ease with the material and builds confidence to present Shakespeare to his or her students.

Without sacrificing the original language, Shakespeare For Children: The Story of Romeo and Juliet, breaks the story down to a level that elementary students can connect with.  While it is written to use with 3rd through 5th graders, I found it engaging and understandable without being a bit intimidating.

The Sixty-Minute Shakespeare series will allow middle and high school students to discover and love what made Shakespeare great.  Again, using original language but abridged so that it is not academically frightening for the students or the teacher.

To Teach Or Not To Teach provides excellent instructional ideas to make the plots and characters come alive for the students.  From just reading through the play, or acting it out to activities reaching past the typical Language Arts or English class assignments and crossing the core curriculum subjects.

After receiving these books and seeing their engaging and approachable style, this home educator is looking forward to teaching Shakespeare the next couple of years .

“I wrote this review as part of a blog campaign by Five Star Publications, Inc., and received samples in order to facilitate my candid review.”