A Serving of Shakespeare, Please!

So how do you get kids interested in Shakespeare? Five Penny Nicole shares her experience with us.

Some of my very first dates with my husband were spent listening to him read aloud. He read me short stories by George MacDonald that brought him to tears, a passage about mice & marriage from C.S. Lewis, and assorted fantasy & science fiction. He once read James Thurber’s fairy tale The Thirteen Clocks to a whole dorm room full of college friends.

I loved that as a young adult, someone was taking the time to read to me. It was something I had loved as a child, when every summer my mom would choose a classic–The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little–and read it to my sister and me. And now I was listening to stories again. What a treat! It was like getting dessert that wouldn’t end up on the hips.

Our reading continued throughout our dating years with Walter Wangerin’s Book of the Dun Cow and Book of Sorrows, plus his pastoral advice about marriage in As for Me and My House, and John Barth’s Tidewater Tales. On our honeymoon we began nibbling our way through The Golden Bowl by Henry James, completing this brilliant, redemptive feast of words shortly after our first anniversary.

Sharing books and stories together was important to us, something we wanted to build into our relationship and into our home when children came along. So when they did, we read all seven Narnia books, nine Little House on the Prairie books, two children’s picture bibles, Anne of Green Gables, Freckles, The Mouse and His Child, The Secret Garden, several Paddington books, Stuart Little, The Boxcar Children, and countless picture books by the time our twins (now 12) were six years old.

All our boys soaked up the words and the cuddles, and our girls are following the same path. As our oldest boys have been reading more on their own, this shared time as a family has to be more intentional. But it often seems this time together brings calm to the chaotic moments in a family of five children. When reading with my children things feel right–for all of us. We are a family of readers, book lovers & sharers of stories.

So it caught me off guard when I was recently asked what type of fresh, creative things I was doing in our homeschool to get our children engaged with Shakespeare. Here’s how it happened:

My husband and I keep our eyes open to our kids’ interests, so we can feed them books that would be appropriate. He found Susan Cooper’s The King of Shadows at the resale shop, in which a boy is taken back to Shakespeare’s time to perform in the original “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and passed it on to our “younger” twin, Monkey-Hawk (12). The book was a hit, and he was inspired to pick up one of several abridged Shakespeare plays (with great illustrations!) that I’d scavenged many years ago before I was married. (I thought they’d be nice when I had children some day…) Before long, he was reading them out loud to his little brother Goldensun (8). It was fun to hear Goldensun’s laughter as he heard how mixed up things were getting between Oberon, Titiana, the young lovers, and the hapless players. (Then we put it down and read the next chapters in Inkspell.)

One reason Monkey-Hawk dove into Susan Cooper’s The King of Shadows so eagerly was that he had read her fantasy series The Dark Is Rising. Both Monkey-Hawk and his twin Shiny-Nail are often immersed in fantasy genres for weeks on end–everything from Lego Bionicle books to Xanth novels to Katharine Kurtz and Orson Scott Card–so we needed to nudge them to expand their horizons.

We picked up a few titles at the library book sale: The Year’s Best Science Writing 2006 (edited by Brian Green, whose Nova show we’d watched online), George Marsden’s The Faith of Barack Obama, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. We put them on the shelf in their bedroom, and told them that when they finished their current books, they had to read from one of these–at least two plays or essays–before (NOT instead of!) going on to the next fantasy title.

Monkey-Hawk had had a taste, and dug in with a will to “Much Ado About Nothing.” His brother Shiny-Nail refused to be outdone (or to hear any spoilers from dad & brother’s conversations!) and is now cruising through the play as well. Our next movie night will probably feature Much Ado with Kennth Brannagh & Emma Thompson.

We offered Shakespeare as part of the main course in our family’s reading diet, not as some sort of literary pill to be choked down because “it’s good for you, and it’s on the List.” We have created a culture of reading together, and honestly that is our only “secret” and whence our creativity stems. We haven’t done a lot of elaborate “learning activities.” Perhaps we’ll dig more deeply into these texts in the months and years to come.

But meanwhile, I will not be surprised if Puck or Prosperpo or perhaps even Henry V shows up in the superhero games they play with the neighbor kids, or if they end up reading aloud to their friends as well as siblings. Because we are what we eat, not just food, but words as well. And how cool would that be, to have our kids socialize their peers with Shakespeare? So I’ll continue to read with my children no matter how old, serving up wonderful helpings of words to live by and memories to hold on to (saying, “Oh, you must try this!”) so that someday Shiny-Nail’s kids might say, as he did, settling into the back seat of the mini-van at Wendy’s,

Ahh–two bacon cheeseburgers and Shakespeare. Mmm…

photo credits: kirtaph, chelseagirl

Nicole Wetzel homeschools five children in Wisconsin. She captures snapshots of her life at Five Penny Nicole. Please head over for a visit. I think she would enjoy the conversation, since she missed this one.