Northfield, MN (2019)
Elementary Shakespeare
When I told the fourth graders we would be studying a Shakespeare play together, one student asked, “Who is Shakespeare?” Another answered, “A really, really famous guy who wrote plays.” After thinking for a bit, another said, “He wrote Romeo and Juliet, right?” The second student added, “And Sherlock Holmes.”
Our group read and acted out excerpts from two plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. Each day, they ran to the library to get started more quickly.
Acting allowed Greenvale Elementary students to understand A Midsummer Night’s Dream by performing it. Titania feigned sleep in her chair after the fairies sung her a lullaby; Lysander yanked his arm away from Hermia to duel Demetrius.
Students compared three videos of Puck’s final monologue—a Royal Shakespeare Company version with a sinister Puck, the Dead Poets Society rendition where Puck is solemn, and a Mickey Rooney version where Puck is youthful and lighthearted. We used literary detective work to look at the monologue through these different lenses.
The children thought Shakespeare’s language “sounded weird” and sounded like “it was from 1500 something.” However, they quickly absorbed many of the language patterns I introduced. We compared the nobles’ speech to the rude mechanicals’, and one student noted that the latter group might have less patterned speech because they were “poor” and might “have never learned to talk like” members of the Athenian court.
When I asked them to write a line of iambic pentameter on a topic of their choice, they quickly learned how to use the “bouncy” speech pattern. A student who had initially written, “The chicken is eating hash browns with salt,” which had the correct syllable number but the incorrect rhythm, wrote a metrically perfect line, “The caterpillar ate the leaf today,” on his next attempt.
