Teaching a Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, and Macbeth: Shakespeare Set Free

by Peggy O'Brien

Book Overview

The Folger Shakespeare Library, the nation's most important center for Shakespeare study and scholarship, is also the center for Shakespeare education. At the Library's Teaching Shakespeare Institute, scholars, actors, and teachers from across the country work together at the business of teaching and learning Shakespeare.

This volume of the Shakespeare Set Free series is written by institute faculty and participants, and includes the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743288505
• ISBN13: 9780743288507
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.4" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic

The lessons provided are great and can easily be switched up to fit your own personal lessons. This book is great and highly recommended.

Great starting place for planning!

Getting high school students interested in Shakespeare seems to be the test of any English teacher, and this book provides a great starting place. I used this to help me design my calendar with timing, and I borrowed several lesssons. I found it to be both practical and adaptable. I definitely recommend this book to teachers starting Shakespeare units.

Great teaching resource

This is a great resource for any English teacher planning to teach one of these 3 plays. The lessons are very well-written and creative with step-by-step instructions! Excellent resource for any teacher who wants his or her students to learn through performance!

This best Shakespeare teaching guide available

I have used this book to teach Macbeth to 7th graders, and I know several high school teachers who swear by it for grades 9 - 12. It contains helpful critical articles to keep teachers up to date on the latest research in the field, as well as day by day lesson plans. Each unit plan is for about 30 days and contains a variety of performance, film analysis, and close reading lessons as well as quizzes, project topics, and final assignments. Lessons can be easily adapted to fit any grade level, required lesson plan structure, or set of state standards. This is the only book you need to buy.

"Shakespeare Set Free" set my imagination free!

Do you have HS students who just don't get Shakespeare? Don't even bother because of the language? Here's the book to break the Shakespeare language barrier. I bought this book for a "secondary English class" at college, since then I have bought one for a friend who teaches drama and I have suggested it to all the 9th and 10th grade English teachers at my high school. The three Shapespeare plays this lesson book covers: Midsummer's Night Dream, MacBeth, and Romeo and Juliette. The authors set it up nicely with a calendar for each selection and approximately 22 lessons in each selection. They provided the objective, the materials list, the lesson, any handouts, homework ideas and questions for reflection. All lessons are formated to include some form of kinesiology, i.e. the students wll have to get out of their seats and move around. Some of my favorites...tossing lines, yelling insults, building a shoebox set and stressing the subtext. There are also many essays in the beginning to help the teacher discover more about the connection to main themes and ideas within the Shakespeare experience. And the best thing was...I am now using some of the ideas for other text which are difficlt for the HS student!