kirchara

You can teach your kids Shakespeare from as young as seven. Brooks was 5.5 years old when he had these lines memorized, just because he’s heard River repeat it so often:

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Here is what River (then 8 y.o.) wrote about A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Oberon, who is furious at Titania, wants the Indian boy to work for him as a squire. Titania replies, "No, this is the son of a beloved friend." Oberon angrily takes revenge by making Titania fall in love with the first thing she sees, a man with a donkey's head. Puck mistakenly puts the flower's juice on the wrong person's eyes. Instead of making Demetrius fall in love with Helena, he ends up making Lysander fall in love with Helena. Since Titania is in love with Nick Bottom and isn't thinking right, Oberon successfully takes away the Indian boy. After he has the boy, Oberon reverses the enchantment on Titania.

I use three books to teach River Shakespeare:

1) Ken Ludwig’s How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare

2) Mary & Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (This book preserves Shakespeare's language. Don’t get any other Shakespeare “summaries” because it’s useless)

3) my college textbook The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Longman, ed. David Bevington).

Bonus: Gareth Hinds’ Romeo and Juliet graphic novel, which uses actual Shakespeare lines. (The wedding night scene is tame and truncated, FYI.) I personally love his recasting of Romeo and Juliet as other races to show that Shakespeare is universal.

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Below is a timeline of River’s Shakespeare journey, from age seven to twelve:
( 7 to 12 years old )

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More information about the contents of the books below:

1) How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig
The book website has free audio recordings of the 26 Shakespeare passages in the book.
Get a hardcover because you'll be using this book for years. The edges of the hardcover is intentionally ragged, FYI.

( List of plays and passages in HTTYCS )

2) Tales from Shakespeare by Mary and Charles Lamb
The comedies are rewritten by Mary, and the tragedies are rewritten by Charles.
Your library probably has a copy you can borrow. If you're buying a physical book, be careful to get a good quality one, because some versions are just poorly photocopied pages bound in a book.

( 14 comedies and 6 tragedies )

3) The Complete Works of Shakespeare
You need a college textbook. Don't just get a random compilation because you need lots of good and reliable footnotes. Earlier or later edition doesn't matter; mine is 4th edition (there are now 7 Longman editions). Renting a textbook isn't that cheap so you might as well buy a used, older edition textbook.
The pages of my Shakespeare book is as thin as Bible pages.

+) Gareth Hinds’ Shakespeare graphic novels. We've only read his Romeo and Juliet graphic novel so I don't know what his other Shakespeare graphic novels are like. Merchant of Venice looks promising though.
The paperback is very high quality and have nice thick covers so you don't need to get a hardcover version (unless you want to).
Hinds has also written & illustrated Macbeth, King Lear, The Odyssey, The Iliad, Beowulf and Poe: Stories and Poems.

CIRCLING* -- DONE 6/8/19

Make a gray mouse out of play doh/clay Draw a mouse on the whiteboard. Have the (computing) mouse ready.

1. Start with the sentence "这是哥哥的鼠标 (shǔ biāo)." ( Read more... )

2. At random, ask these questions:
- YES question: "这是哥哥的鼠标吗?"

- NO question:
"这是哥哥的老鼠吗?"
"这是弟弟的鼠标吗?"

- OR question: "这是哥哥还是弟弟的鼠标?"

- 5Wh + H question:
"这是谁的鼠标?"
"这是什么?"

- etc. following their interest and attention span

I used these index cards at random to prompt myself: ( Read more... )

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Circling Introspective:

- They are (thankfully) easily amused. They would sometimes intentionally give the wrong answer, pick up my shoe and say, "这是妈妈的老鼠," etc.

- River said he did not hear every single thing that I said because he got distracted, but he did understand everything he did hear. And that's the main goal of circling/TPRS**: comprehensible input.

- When I asked Brooks, "英文怎么说," he answered "big brother's computer mouse" instead of "This is big brother's computer mouse." Either he hasn't acquired that "这是" = "This is," or he usually doesn't translate Mandarin into English in his head.

* Here's a pdf from Terry Waltz's website that tells you how circling works.

** TPRS = Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling