Starting Shakespeare

Gr 5 Up—Shakespeare's plays tend to leave high school students running for the hills, turned off by the language and ultimately missing out on some of the world's greatest literary masterpieces. Is there a solution to this problem? Australia's national theater company, Bell Shakespeare, thinks so. They've teamed up with the developer Deeper Richer to create an iPad app designed to help teachers introduce Shakespeare to students before they even get to high school. This cleanly designed and easy-to-use app provides brief historical overviews of Shakespeare's world and work, as well as a variety of avenues for getting to know his plays, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, through narrated synopses with video dramatizations, short text and video profiles of the characters, enactments of "Key Scenes," and fun, interactive "Learning Journeys."The scenes, performed by an energetic, engaging, and youthful cast (professional Bell Shakespeare actors), are accessible to younger learners. Sets, costumes, and props are minimal, yet have plenty of whimsy to keep things lively. The video quality is exceptionally high, perfect for projecting in classrooms.Students can use the "Learning Journeys" to explore Shakespeare's language in playful, creative, and cooperative ways. Activities include inventing and drawing new ingredients for the witches' brew in Macbeth, then uploading the drawings with the camera; enhancing the witches' spell by dragging and dropping Shakespearian adjectives into Shakespeare's lines; writing new spells with the iPad's virtual keyboard and recording read-throughs with the microphone; and, recording others acting out the newly created spells. Adding to the overall richness of Starting Shakespeare is a free teacher's guide, available through iBooks, with lesson plans, additional learning activities, and curriculum tie-ins. Most definitely worth a try.—Kathleen S. Wilson, New York University, NY.