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How to do Midsummer Night's Dream with 5th/6th graders


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I read aloud the "story" in Edith Nesbit's Shakespeare Stories. We are going to see the play live in September done by a local Shakespeare Company. How would you recommend tackling reading the play itself? I have the Oxford School Shakespeare version. I am afraid to assign it as reading unless we do tiny chunks. Is there an audio version we can listen to while we read it?  Or should I attempt it as a read aloud?? 

 

If there is a thread already somewhere on this, just direct me to the right place. Thanks!!!

 

 

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I read this play with my 12yo earlier this year. We read through Oxford School Shakespeare version. Our system is that I read it out loud, substituting in the more understandable words/phrases from the annotations while ds reads along and sees what the original wording is. Every so often we stop so I can make sure ds understands what's going on, gets the joke, etc. Then at the end of the scene we listen to the Arkangel Shakespeare audio of the scene. This worked out okay. Ds is not thrilled with Shakespeare, but he ended up thinking Bottom was very funny. 

 

We're going to see a staged production of The Tempest next spring and I'm planning to pre-read it as described above, but skip the audio. He'll go in understanding the story, and he'll gain all the other insights from actually watching it.

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We slow read through it, we did Midsummer last year. Just a page or so a day, takes all year! We also got a bunch of kids together to perform a scene in the botanical gardens near the end of the year - that was a huge hit!

 

This year we saw Macbeth just after christmas, have been slow reading through it, and hopefully will do a performance again!

 

We slow read through it out loud together, I use a book that has line by line helps lol. Then we I dictate a line for my kids to write down. Simple.

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