Ultimate Homeschooling Shakespeare List

You are reading the Ultimate Homeschooling Shakespeare List, posted by Heather Mac, originally appearing on Joyful Socks Mom blog.

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As we end a week of Shakespeare fun & fellowship, I hope your ready to rev up your homeschool to welcome a bit of the Bard.  Let the question not be, "to be, or not to be?", but let the question be when?  The answer there is, there is no time like the present!

I have prepared this list of Shakespeare resources hoping to include only that which I believe to be the most enriching to an excellent stud of Shakespeare.  I have also focused on plays that are appropriate for the family, as well as resources that are easy to implement and require few "start up" materials.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Resources below are listed topically, by play, that may be of interest to a home educator,  I have also linked each title to a FREE download of the corresponding play:

• A Midsummer's Night Dream: Lesson on Conflict Resolution & Happy Endings; 
• As You Like It
• Hamlet
• Henry V
• Julius Caesar
• King Lear
• Macbeth: Macbeth activities, ideas and lessons (modify for child's stage of development); Quiz on Macbeth
• The Merchant of Venice: Here is a narrative of The Merchant of Venice retold by H.E. Marshall; 
• Romeo and Juliet: Romeo & Juliet Theme page (tons of activities, ideas and lessons) - some need modified for age appropriateness; Make Capulet & Montegue Family Shields; 

Charles & Mary Lamb's Shakespeare is a great version to begin introducing your family to Shakespeare's story lines and themes. (FREE download from Gutenberg.org)

Try this Free from Librivox, Lamb's Shakespeare on Audio.

No Fear Shakespeare is also FREE online from Spark Notes.  This resource has aligned the original Shakespearean text and compares with modern language on the same page.

Performing Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Creative Dramatics at Home, Shakespeare from Charlotte Mason Help, Performing with Shakespeare, 

Shakespeare In Your Homeschool:

• Short introduction and Lesson Plan ideas for beginning Shakespeare Study.
• Absolute Shakespeare is a great guidepost for Shakespeare resource and references online.
• Excellent page for deciphering and discussing the grammar of Shakespeare.
• Surfing the Bard is an excellent reference site complete with zones for teachers, students and even a fun zone.  See, I told you Shakespeare could be fun.
• Younger Student writing lesson on Shakespeare's Sonnets.
• Here is a great Student Guide, Shakespeare 101 that would be an excellent resource for your older students.
• This Shakespeare Study Guide is the ultimate "go-to" for middle school to high school students studying Shakespeare in-depth.
• Here is a quick lesson on Sonnets, along with reading in cadence and writing in rhyme. 
• This is a great lens about the history of the Globe Theatre in London.
• Study the history behind many of Shakespeare's historical plays with Heritage History (one of my favorite living history resources).  Our Island Story by: H.E. Marshall is an excellent read, along with English Literature from the same author.  I recommend the excerpts on Shakespeare: The Boy, The Man

Notebooking with Shakespeare:

• Great notebooking page from the Notebooking Fairy to help you perform Character Analysis on Shakespeare's complicated characters.
• Build a Shakespeare "Theme Page", examining the themes of the plays that you study.  Use this resource to help you research themes from some of Shakespeare's plays.
• Homeschool Share has an entire page of FREE Shakespeare Notebooking pages we have used.
• Scrapbooking with Shakespeare ideas on PBS.
• Karen's Whimsy website has beautiful public domain images from Shakespeare play that are great for notebooking.  You may want to note there are several here in this article.
• Here is a great plan for building the Globe Theater out of paper from Paper Toys.

Shakespeare Gets Techy: There's an app for that!  Here are a few of my personal favorite Shakespeare apps.

• Shakespeare in Bits (Pay per play, but Sample Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet).  My daughter loves watching these.  They are animated with Shakespearean costuming and excellent actor's voice-overs. 
• Shakespeare Made Easy. Great resource for beginners.  Helps translate Shakespeare to make the language more accessible to modern readers.
• Collected Works of Shakespeare on iTunes.
• Shakespeare Lit Quiz app by Book Rags.  Lite FREE version and you can purchase more content if you need it.
• ShakeShare: Shareable Quotes - If you follow me on Instagram you would have seen some of my posts.  Some of the #hashtags produced by this app are totally hilarious (of course, you all know how easy I am to entertain.

Articles On Shakespeare:  This is a short collection of some of my favorite online reading regarding Shakespeare and the teaching of the Bard.

• Shakespeare for Christians by Harmony Arts Mom
• Ambleside Online recommendations for Shakespeare the Charlotte Mason way.
• I enjoyed all of these articles on Shakespeare from A Peaceful Day: The Feast That Is Shakespeare, Seeing Shakespeare Performed
• In depth look at Shakespeare from the Head of Education at Folger Shakespeare Library.

Joyful Socks on The Bard: Of course, let's not forget yours truly.

• The Bible and Shakespeare Make A Great Team: Why Christians should be teaching Shakespeare.
• Shall Thou Go To Ye Olde' Cinema?  Shakespeare in the movies, may not be all that the Bard intended.  
• Action Packed Shakespeare - Excitement, adventure and swash-buckling Shakespearean learning.
• The Art of Shakespeare - Art lessons for studying Shakespeare.
• Shakespeare Festival in Your Backyard - Invite your family, friends and neighbors to enjoy Shakespeare learning alongside you.

One final recommendation that I would ask you to indulge.  This wonderful inspirational book on Shakespeare by Peter J. Leithart.  The book, Brightest Heaven of Invention,  is a guide through six of Shakespeare's plays from a distinctively Christian worldview.  I own this book, and find it a consistent inspiration and a constant reminder that insights from Shakespeare plays, however distant; are still complex, relevant and worth digging into!

 

"The play's the thing!" ~ William Shakespeare

I hope that you enjoy discovering all the wonderful ideas and thoughts that Shakespeare has to lend both you and your children.

Joyfully Learning with You,

The Joyful Socks Mom 

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