Here is a good game to play with your charges. Pairs of pupils roll a die and choose the corresponding numbered card. They read the card and perform the action verb written there until the teacher calls out time.

Students write a news feature or editorial about students paying money to participate in high school athletics. Students interview members of the school community to find out the situation in their school.

Pupils partner work exploring turn taking and gestures. They access to stop when the music stops and listen to the leader's instruction. Students/teams meet at opposite sides of the room and decide their character. They practice moving...

Prove that Gertrude did kill Ophelia from practicing the word inflections activities with these pre-reading strategies for Hamlet. Thespians practice the line, “Is that your sandwich?” as they stress and accent different words, and...

“All the world’s a stage,” exclaims Jaques in As You Like It, but it is the structure of the Globe stage and how that structure influenced Shakespeare’s plays that is the focus of an on-line research project. Class members visit a series...

Students, in groups, study a Tony Award winner from the past through researching its history, watching the production, and reading the written origin of the production. They create programs for these productions and assess

Why did Vietnam POWs and their families receive more media attention than POWs in previous wars?  To answer this question, class members view artifacts, read articles, and engage in class discussion. Individuals then assume the...

Class members compare the final 30 minutes of Lucas's Star Wars: A New Hope with Act V of Doescher's play, William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope and consider how the choice of media influences viewers' impression...

Students discover the two main ingredients of a play: speech and actions. They then listen to a shortened version of "Macbeth" and write down one sentence to describe what is happening in each of the comic-strip cells.

How do modern adaptations of Shakespearean plays relate to their original source material? Middle and high schoolers focus on Shakespeare's play Othello and its screen adaptation "O" to explore how modern film adaptations of Shakespeare...

Touchdown is a tag game built around stealth and deception. One team is given a small object that fits inside the palm of a hand. Players start at one end of the field and try to get the hidden object across the field to the other...

Should Romeo and Juliet have revealed their engagement to their parents? After reading Acts I and II of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, your class discusses this question with a SMARTboard presentation (though the lesson plan still...

After class members have read and discussed Act III of The Winter’s Tale, groups select one line from Act III, scene i that they feel captures the essence of the entire scene. They then create a tableaux that best depicts the scene’s...

A crossword puzzle asks readers of Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, to recall events and characters in the 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

Students discuss the sanity of Hamlet and Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Students analyze an image from the play to address the sanity of the two characters. Then students read the text to determine whether the characters' words and...

Eighth graders examine the forces that are constantly acting on the Earth. They describe the theory of tectonic plates and demonstrate the two kinds of earthquake waves. They also examine the role of volcanoes in the structure of the...

Students complete compare and contrast activities for two stories about racism and tolerance in the science fiction genre. In this literary analysis lesson, students read a Ray Bradbury short story and Walter Mosley poem, watch a related...

Students examine two conflicting writings on solar eclipse that occurred on Black Monday and discuss them in the context of Shakespeare's King Lear. In this Shakespeare instructional activity, students discuss astrology and read the...

The elements of music and journalistic integrity in one lesson; What could be better? The class discusses journalistic approaches to better understand responsible reporting versus sensationalism. They watch the Act One from the film...

Students research philanthropy in three genres: a play, a fable, and a parable. Students read an Aesop fable and answer questions in groups. Students complete steps in two worksheets from 'The Good San Franciscan' and 'Someone Should.'...

Young scholars discover the importance of matching verbs to their subjects through a discussion of a whimsical video on verb agreement and a read aloud of the book, "To Root, To Toot To Parachute". They practice verb agreement in...

Learners complete a variety of activities related to the book The Cow That Went Oink. They role-play the various animals from the story, write a letter to a farm animal in the book, identify syllables of story words, and create an...

Class members compare the ways the subject of immigration is treated in The Tempest, Act I, scene ii, Act II, scene i and Act III, scene ii with patterns in American history. After tracing their own family’s journey, a series of...

Asking questions about a text is an effective way to improve reading comprehension. Apply the Question Answer Response strategy to your unit on William Shakespeare's The Tempest. As kids read each passage, they decide if the answer...