How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig

In the book, Ken recommends starting children off with memorizing a short passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Learning to Memorize Shakespeare Dialogue for Kids

I greatly appreciated the candor of Ludwig’s writing and that made me more receptive to trying his ideas. Yes, your kids will get bored if they try to read the plays as they are written.īut there are ways to help them get past these obstacles and truly love these plays if we try the suggestions offered. Yes, your kids will get frustrated at trying to memorize the lines. Yes, your kids will have difficulty understanding the plays. The author, Ken Ludwig, doesn’t shy away from any of these potential challenges. How on earth could I keep them excited about reading them?Īnd this is why How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare is so awesome. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are pretty long.

My kids will get bored trying to read the plays.They’ll get frustrated at the long words and give up after a few tries. My kids won’t be interested in memorizing dialogue.They won’t understand it and it’ll be a waste of time.

My kids are too young to study Shakespeare.Personally, I had made a list of reasons why I thought I had to wait until my kids were older to teach them about the Bard, including the following: It is truly packed with ideas and suggestions for how parents can bring these works to life, even for kids who are very young or unenthusiastic about learning poetry. I started by reading the book How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig. (Affiliate links provided here for convenience. All opinions are my own and I was not required to write a positive review. And find out how you can win a FREE copy of the book for your family!ĭisclosure: I received this product in exchange for this post and I was compensated for my time. But my two boys are not the voracious readers that my girls are, which means I had my work cut out for me.Īnd that’s why I was excited to review the book How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare with the kids! With the quotes and ideas from the book, we were able to make Shakespeare fun for kids, even my reluctant readers! So I decided to introduce Shakespeare to my children as soon as possible. Rereading his works as an English major when I returned to college a few years ago left me in awe at how poignantly he could describe the most ordinary things. It’s almost as if each line is intentionally written to stand alone as a quote. I watched a live rendition of Twelfth Night for English lit class and I think I went to sleep during Act II.Īs I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve started to appreciate the wit, vocabulary, and poetry of Shakespeare’s writing. I didn’t learn about Shakespeare at all during grade school, so it wasn’t until I got to college that I got a chance to read and watch classic Shakespearean plays. And, to be honest, it was confusing.