Language is always the hardest aspect of teaching Shakespeare to young people, but this programme aims to overcome such difficulties by focusing on key teaching ideas and techniques that will engage pupils with Shakespeare.
Macbeth in the Classroom features Sabrina Broadbent, an English teacher at Hornsey School for Girls in Haringey, as she teaches two lessons on the set scenes for Macbeth to her Year 9 class. In the previous two weeks, she has been reading through the play alongside viewing the Polanski film version of the play.
In these two lessons, we see Sabrina engage the class with closer work on language and character in Act 1 Scene 3, one of the set scenes for Year 9 SATs examination in May 2004. Sabrina uses many strategies to make the lesson exciting for pupils, including:
- Pair work on single lines from the scene
- Drama work as a way in to thinking about staging
- Choral reading
- Analysis of Shakespeare's use of language using an OHP
The range of activities on the language of Shakespeare featured here are designed to encourage English teachers to try out more active approaches to reading a text and widen their repertoire of approaches.
