Celebrating William Shakespeare’s Birthday

April 23 is William Shakespeare’s birthday, and to honor the Bard I’ve collected lesson plans from the ReadWriteThink site that you can use to celebrate (or save for the next time you’re talking about Shakespeare in class.

• Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Have grades 6-8 students become History Detectives Using Shakespeare’s Secret.
• Pop culture combines with Shakespeare in the grades 6-8 lesson Analyzing Advice as an Introduction to Shakespeare.
• Talk about Shakespeare, superstition, and folklore with these resources on the Ides of March.
• Explore the modern significance of an older text with Star-Crossed Lovers Online: Romeo and Juliet for a Digital Age.
• Encourage students to connect a summary of the play to their everyday lives as teenagers with Tragic Love: Introducing Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.
• Students compare a performance at The Globe with a modern production in the lesson All’s Well that Sells Well.
• After reading a play, students Construct New Understanding Through Choral Readings of Shakespeare.
• Try a Book Report Alternative: Characters for Hire! Studying Character in Drama.
• Explore Renaissance Humanism in Hamlet and The Birth of Venus.
• Students identify interesting words from Shakespeare’s plays and add them to a classroom vocabulary collection in Choosing, Chatting, and Collecting: Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy.
• Time for some court room drama. Put Shakespeare's Literary Characters on Trial: Combining Persuasion and Literary Analysis.
• Students compose epitaphs for deceased characters in Analyzing Character in Hamlet through Epitaphs.
• Students consider Shakespearean literature to be or not to be useful in a modern context when they analyze the relationship between text and reader interpretation in the lesson Interpretation is the thing!

If you have feedback or questions about ReadWriteThink, all you have to do is contact us.

—Traci Gardner

[Photo: Shakespeare's Birthplace by MichelleWalz, on Flickr]