Week 9 - Teaching Shakespeare

The internet has a wealth of information for teaching Shakespeare, including lesson plans, class activities, materials, and ICT extras. There are many compilation sites with links to diverse resources. The first I'll look at is Shakespeare in Education (http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/educational.htm#Courses):

My first impression is how comprehensive the site is, with a wide variety of links. However of the first 10 links I clicked on, only 1 took me to the site it advertised. The site hasn't been updated since 2009. It takes a bit of patience to find the still-valid resources. The commercial resources section seems to be the best-maintained part of the site.

I'm giving up on that site and trying Folger Shakespeare Library's Lesson Plan Archive (http://www.folger.edu/eduLesPlanArch.cfm).

The Folger Shakespeare Library is in Washington, D.C., and is a research library which also has public programs of plays and reading, as well as a strong educational focus. This site was last modified today, so has currency, and well-maintained links. It has lesson plans for individual plays, sonnets, general lessons, introducing Shakespeare, making films, using interactive media, etc. The plans are very comprehensive, and have a wide variety of activities for all language modes, and age ranges. There are video and audio resources for use in class:

They also produce a blog to keep teachers in touch with their new resources (http://folgereducation.wordpress.com/), primary texts from their collection with relevance to Shakespeare lessons, and quizzes and games for younger students. It has a huge number and variety of resources for setting the scene of a play, introducing them, teaching the plays, analysis, interpretation, representation by students, etc. After seeing this site, I'd skip the first one completely!

Shakespeare Illustrated (http://shakespeare.emory.edu/illustrated_index.cfm) is a great site for accessing images by artists of scenes or characters from Shakespeare's plays:

I think this is a great resource for introducing characters, or to use as an illustration to guide students to make their own representations of characters or scenes from the plays. They are also good for having in a powerpoint presentation introducing a play.