Hello all!

I stumbled across a website dedicated to helping us, ordinary people, decipher meaning for Shakespeare's works. the website is http://www.folger.edu/index.cfm

Some good tips that I picked from the website

1) (multimodal literacies! - a buzzword) Picture Poems
This webpage suggests how we can introduce a play by using the students to create a poem from pictures (to be googled or text covers). With this teaching strategy, students get to produce a creative work using Shakespeare's choice of words and feel less daunted to engage the language in the text.

Lesson Guide

What’s On for Today and Why
Students will write descriptive poems of selected images of The Tempest using vocabulary from a word bank (a collection of Shakespearean words and phrases divided into useful descriptive categories.) This activity will help students become more comfortable with the language of the play and enable them to start thinking about what characters in the play might look like."

http://www.folger.edu/edulesplandtl.cfm?lpid=765

2) Teaching figurative language - Students to role-play - Charades

Students have to figure out how to act out a line and have their friends figure out what lines they have performed in the play, specifically here 'Romeo and Juliet, 2.2'

Lesson Guide

"What’s On for Today and Why
This lesson plan is intended for students that will learn how Shakespeare uses figurative language and abstract comparison in the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.
To this end, students will play figurative language charades with 10 lines from the scene. The goal is to make figurative language more accessible to students and to help them visualize and identify specific figures of speech."

from: http://www.folger.edu/eduLesPlanDtl.cfm?lpid=609

3) Just wordle it! This would be a great strategy to introduce texts to students.

Lesson Guide

"What’s On for Today and Why
For many students, Shakespeare's language can be intimidating. For English Language Learners (ELLs) this can be especially true. In an effort to make the language more approachable before reading, and allow students to make some predictions about the text, students will analyze a Wordle of the top 150 words in Hamlet. Wordle.net is a website that allows you to cut and paste text and create a word cloud (a visual of the words in the play) that occur the most. The most frequent words appear the largest in the word cloud. By allowing students to explore the language of the text before reading and predict what will occur in the play, the text becomes more accessible."

from: http://www.folger.edu/eduLesPlanDtl.cfm?lpid=851

the website is a treasure trove of lesson plans and ideas for teaching and tackling Shakespeare. What's best is that the ideas for activities are transferable to any text that you're covering in class. Venture forth! :D

quacks,Hidayah