Is 4th grade too early for Shakespeare? One family’s experience

My son is finishing up his 4th grade year homeschooling, and it has been a great year. We’ve spent the year studying astronomy and space exploration for science, working through the 4th grade math curriculum with Khan Academy Math, learning about famous privateer turned pirate, Captain Kidd, and reading the Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett along with many other stories.

4th grade also had us introducing two new subjects: Citizenship (I’ll do a whole blog post in the future on this subject, but essentially this year it meant reading stories from the history of the Roman Empire); and Shakespeare.

If you went to public school with me, you might think…4th grade? That’s too early to start Shakespeare. I went to public school and I don’t think we even heard the name Shakespeare in class until 10th grade when it was part of the high school curriculum to read one Shakespeare play per year. It was something to be endured, to “get through” to check a box on the provincial curriculum to pass high school English. I “endured” The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, and Hamlet.

And then I began homeschooling.

Why Shakespeare?

One gift that homeschooling has given our family is that school learning is not some box to be checked off, a standard to be mastered. Charlotte Mason wrote that “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.” She meant that education is what you surround yourself with and what you immerse yourself in (atmosphere). Education is good habits, perseverance, commitment to learn, and daily exercise (discipline). And education is a life – your whole life is learning. Everything you do is a chance to learn, your whole life long. We learn for life, not for the standardized tests.

Charlotte Mason divided all of her subjects under three over-arching umbrellas: Knowledge of God (to this I add knowledge of self, faith, hope, and love), Knowledge of Man (art, language, history, literature, and all other things that man has done and created), and Knowledge of the Universe (science, math, nature). When it came to the Knowledge of Man, Charlotte Mason thought children should be familiar with as much cultural history as possible so that they understand references to these things, and so that they can converse with a wide-variety of people they will meet in their lives. While these days we have such a heavy focus on the STEM subjects as the key to a good life (Knowledge of the Universe), we must have balance. No one wants to hang out with some guy who knows everything there is to know about digging holes but can literally talk of nothing else. Well, maybe a mole does.

Reading Shakespeare’s plays, being familiar with the stories he told and the life he led – it helps us to understand cultural references. A key part of education is the relationships we make between things as we learn – and once you know Shakespeare, you will see references to Shakespeare everywhere. You will be on the “inside”, getting “it”, part of the joke – instead of the butt of it.

So how did I introduce Shakespeare to a 9-year-old fourth-grader this year?

Well we started with a picture book biography called William Shakespeare & the Globe by Aliki.

This book formats a short biography of Shakespeare into his famous five act structure. It also includes a fun page about language we still use today that was coined by William Shakespeare.

My son also read the Who HQ biography of William Shakespeare because he loves this series and will pretty much devour anything in it.

Who Was William Shakespeare? by Celeste Davidson Mannis

And then we dove into reading our first play. I chose A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it’s got fairies, magic potion making people act crazy, and a guy gets turned into a donkey-man – so there’s some pretty good 9-year-old-boy humour in this play.

To start, we read an retelling of the story, to familiarize ourselves with the characters and the plot. There is one in Shakespeare Retold by E. Nesbit that is about 9 pages in length.

Then, instead of choosing the established and beloved Folger Shakespeare Library edition (the ones we studied in high school), I decided to go with a graphic novel version with the original Shakespeare text. This one is adapted by John McDonald.

My 4th grader has excellent reading comprehension. I chose to go with the original text so that we could familiarize ourselves with Shakespeare’s language, be exposed to the way it sounds, and generally how it is written. Did we spend time dissecting every sentence for comprehension? No. The goal for fourth grade was exposure to the story, to the language, to the idea that people are still making references to this play 500 years later, and that this play is still being performed today.

If your fourth grader finds reading a challenge – I think you can use your judgment on what would be a reading-stretch for them and go with one of the alternate text versions of this adaptation – with the same graphics, John McDonald also has a Plain Text (adapted to modern English) and a Quick Text (a short and sweet version in plain English). I’d still say – go with what stretches them linguistically. It’s okay if it’s a bit of a challenge – the graphics make it all more comprehensible.

Reading the graphic novel version was a great decision. First, my son loves graphic novels, so Shakespeare in a graphic novel format automatically makes it cooler. Second, the images helped us both understand what in the world was going on. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed – with imagery, facial expressions, and props. When reading the play, it makes a lot more sense having a better visual of who is in the scene, their emotions, and their actions.

Lastly, we were fortunate because I was able to find a live performance of a Midsummer Night’s Dream not too far from us (one of the perks of living in a large metropolis). It was an opera adaptation of a Midsummer Night’s Dream done by Pocket Opera, a local opera company.

So last night we set out on our mom and son date night to the theatre and had a lovely time. I’ll admit we were skeptical – would the opera aspect of the play overwhelm the whole thing? But the operatic-singing donkey-transfigured Nick Bottom was hilarious and memorable. The fairies flitting around and singing creepy sounding diminished scales added a lot to the atmosphere of the play. And hey, my son went to his first opera. He was a perfect date. A true gentleman, laughing his 9 year old head off.

I told him on the drive home that next year I thought we could do Romeo and Juliet as our play – and he told me all about how in his book, Space Case by Stuart Gibbs they play a game based on Romeo and Juliet and it was really funny. So yeah, like I said – there are Shakespeare references in everything and the science of relations tying Shakespeare into our year of astronomy is what makes learning so special.

Warmly,

-Heather

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Enjoyed this post? Check out some of my other recent posts.

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