Shakespeare for Kids??

When I first saw Shakespeare on our curriculum for this year, I balked big time.  I said no way am I doing Shakespeare with a six year old.  But I did it.  And it worked out great.  She loves it!!

I attribute her enjoyment to two things.  The first absolutely most important is the source material.  We are using Beautiful Stories From Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit.  The plays are abridged but much of Shakespeare's original language is kept.  The length is just right for Froggy.  So far we have read A Midsummer's Night Dream as well as The Winter's Tale.  How can you turn down fairies right?  That was not a hard sell.  But I was really worried about The Winter's Tale particularly since I had never read it myself. 

 Enter item number two.  The next step to making Shakespeare fun for us is Masterpuppet Theatre.  It is a set of 60 cards with finger holes cut out to make them like puppets.  There are also a series of backdrops included.  Froggy was thrilled when this arrived in the mail and begged me to start reading right away so she could play with the puppets.  It does not include all the characters of all the plays but we made do.  We used queens, kings and other characters to be the players.  I showed Froggy the card as I read and then she used them for her telling back.  It was one of her most impressive narrations especially given the length of the source material. 

Froggy is so excited about Shakespeare that we have even arranged to see All's Well That Ends Well at the end of Summer.