"A Sad Tale's Best for Winter": The Winter's Tale in our Homeschool High School

My teenager took this pic of the empty stage before The Winter's Tale began. Lots of clock imagery and candles!

As you might recall if you hang out on my blog's Facebook page with me, I have... opinions about how Shakespeare's plays should be explored with high school students:

Considering that Shakespeare didn't even write the plays as we currently read them, and they were instead reconstructed from the actual materials that the actors and other theatre personnel used, often with typos and undoubtedly with/without elements included in the production of the plays but perhaps not written down, I don't place value on "reading" the plays, other than the ability to reference them for citations. 

If that's all you've got access to, then obviously go for it, but that's not all you have access to. DVDs and the internet are the best resources for exploring Shakespeare's plays, because there you can see the plays how they're best seen, interpreted through the eyes of actors, stage managers, dramaturgs, costume designers, hair and makeup artists, and and lighting technicians. 

In my homeschool, we study approximately one Shakespeare play a year this way, usually through a student production at our local university. I don't know about the local theatre options anywhere outside of my small city, but our local theatre productions are AMAZING!!! They're generally equal to anything professional that I've seen, and I can name several of their productions off the top of my head that were better than a professional show. 

This recent production of The Winter's Tale wasn't as exciting as last year's Macbeth, done in the round in a converted formal dining hall, or my favorite, a years-ago female-only production of Julius Caesar, but my teenager liked the costumes (so many underbust corsets!), and all the acting was perfect, and the plot is so bonkers that you can't not have an opinion. 

And, of COURSE, the whole point of even going to the production is to see in real life the world's most famous stage direction: "Exit, pursued by a bear." I gripped my teenager's arm tightly in anticipation of this moment, which was acted by a group of modern dancers. During intermission I was all set to provide my teenager with a lecture on Elizabethan England's obsession with abducting bears and holding them hostage while being mean to them, but it turned out that she already knew this... because she remembered it from Magic Tree House. 

Thank you, Stage Fright on a Summer Night!

We'll be studying more about Elizabethan England and Shakespeare later this Spring, so for this particular unit, watching the play and discussing it with each other (with an emphasis on how the costumes aided/hindered meaning) was sufficient, but there's a ton more history, geography, literary analysis, comparative analysis, and research that you could do to flesh this one play out into a larger study. 

For a simple and easy to follow plot summary, I like these three-minute animated plot summaries from The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Here's the one for The Winter's Tale:

I like to have my kids watch these before we see the play, because it's no fun if you can't follow the plot!

And more importantly, not only is it no fun, but your brainpower won't be available for more sophisticated analysis and thoughtful opinions if it's busy struggling to figure out what on earth is even going on every minute.

Along with the plot summary, it's important to know the characters and how they're related to each other. I'll download any infographic I find that's attractive and accurate--

via the Illinois Shakespeare Festival

--but I also like to pull from the millions of educational guides to specific plays that various theatres have made available online. They're usually written to classroom teachers and so will include a lot of classroom activities that you may or may not want to modify to suit your homeschooler (discussion questions make great essay topics!), and a lot of background info on different topics that's usually written at an appropriate level for students to read and enjoy independently.

Here are some good ones for The Winter's Tale:

• A Noise Within. This is my favorite study guide, with tons of contextual information and some quite solid student activity suggestions. 
• Seattle Shakespeare Company. I like the way that the character map is divided by Act in this study guide, although the suggested student activities are corny.
• Yale Repertory Theatre. Along with the character map, I really like the Actor's Notebook section in this guide. It shows students how to read and interpret the play as an actor would.

For more in-depth resources, the Folger Shakespeare Library has articles and lesson plans, and full-text downloads of the play in various formats. Even if you're reading the full text of the play with your homeschooler, it's good to have the full text so you can reference lines that interest you and find scenes and quotes to illustrate, etc.

Here are some other hands-on activities to incorporate into any Shakespeare study:

• Globe Theatre. Understanding the layout and infrastructure of the Globe is crucial to understanding how Shakespeare's plays were originally meant to be experienced. Kids who like hands-on activities, puzzles, models, and imaginary play might like to build this paper model of the Globe... or you can build it for younger kids, make them a set of mini paper dolls to go with it, and let them create their own small world productions.
• stick puppet theatre. Another fun way to get kids involved in reading and reciting Shakespeare is to help them turn part of a scene into a puppet theatre. Kids can draw their characters, color in line drawings, or just help choose images, and then they get to memorize their lines and put on a play!
• historically-accurate recipes. Because cooking is a great way to homeschool! I wish there was an excellent Elizabethan England cookbook that I could recommend, but at least there are plenty of historically-accurate recipes shared around the internet by various historical societies and museums. The one below is from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust!

• The Game of Shakespeare's Life. This game would work best after reading a biography of Shakespeare. Bonus points for asking the kids to research more historical or biographical events to fill in the rest of the spaces!
• Shakespeare-themed Poetry Tea. We love our poetry teas!

Depending on what your kid is into, there are also all kinds of creative ways they can explore, analyze, and interpret Shakespeare's plays, including writing fanfiction, staging and acting out scenes, creating dioramas of a scene or the theatre, making trading cards of the characters, drawing a book or program cover, illustrating a quote, creating infographics, etc. 

Add on a nice little analytical essay to finish it up, and you're all set!