Learning Shakespeare

We use Ambleside Online as a guide for our curriculum. If you're a homeschooler who likes Charlotte Mason then you have probably heard of it. We started halfway through first grade and now we're halfway through third grade and I love it. It's a great fit for our family. If you don't know who Charlotte Mason is, do yourself a favor and google her. She had some radical ideas of how children should be taught and how they learn. One of the main points of her teaching is that children should learn from living books. "Living books" are books that make the subject "come alive".
One of the books on our list for the past few years is called, "Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children" (Edited by E. Nesbitt). I found it on Amazon for under $10. It has twenty adaptations from Shakespeare's plays.
My mom recently bought us another collection of condensed plays that are written specifically for children. They have a few direct quotes but it's written so that children can read them for themselves and really grasp what's going on.

Last week we decided to read about Hamlet. We first read the version from "Shakespeare Children's Story". It was about 60 pages and took about 20 minutes for me to read to them. They are short pages with black and white illustrations. After we read that one we read the version from "Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children" and while I read it the kids acted it out. They LOVED acting it out. They even went upstairs and dressed up for their parts and found props.

Later that afternoon, we found Denmark on the map (the oldest two are currently memorizing the European countries) and we copied a quote from Hamlet for some handwriting practice. 

I let the Kindergartner trace over my handwriting....and apparently she thought his name was "Hamtet". Haha. I love when our school days flow like this and the learning seems easy!