Hear a teacher's perspective on how to teach Shakespeare to elementary students

[MUSIC PLAYING] ANDREA JACKSON: For teachers wanting to do Shakespeare with their younger students, the advice that I would give to them is to just free themselves from the idea that they need to slavishly teach the whole play and that every single word that Shakespeare wrote is sacred. Just allow them to cut the text into two scenes and speeches that are full of action and full of great images that the kids will really get into and not feel that they have to go word-by-word through absolutely everything. And then in looking at that text, the more that they can do that's active and on their feet with the kids, actually speaking the text and acting it out, is going to be the best.

Because they're plays, they're not novels, and they're meant to be heard and spoken. So anything that gets the kids up on their feet with the language in their mouths and acting out the stories and putting themselves in the character's shoes and getting at the text from the inside rather than the outside in is going to be great. A great introductory activity that I do with students when we're first starting a play, before they know anything about the play, is a game where we just stand in a circle and each student has a word, just a single word from the text, and we pass a ball around as they say their word from the text in different order.

And then they're starting to hear different words that recur and different themes start to emerge about what the story might be about based on those words. And it activates their predicting skills. And it's their little hook into wanting to know more about what the story's going to be about.