Shakespeare for Elementary School

Shakespeare didn’t write his plays for the highly educated. Actors performed his plays at the Globe Theater for people from all walks of life—and all ages! Keep the tradition alive at your elementary school. When presented in the right way, the stories in Shakespeare’s plays are perfect for even the youngest students. We rounded up resources that will help you get your students started on a lifelong love for Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s Words

-Use Green Eggs and Ham to introduce the idea of iambic pentameter! Full lesson plan here.

-Act out the Three Witches scene from Macbeth. Full lesson plan here.

-Spring marks the beginning of the main Shakespeare performance season. Take your students to see a local production of Shakespeare. Search for Shakespeare + Your Home Town on Google to see if there are any upcoming productions. Many Shakespeare companies offer educational discounts to create lifelong Shakespeare fans.

-Spice up your vocab study with weird Shakespeare words.

Visual Art Resources

-Print Shakespeare’s face and color it in here and here!

-Make Shakespeare scrapbooks!

-Construct your very own Globe theater with this printout.

-Illustrate a scene from the play. Full lesson plan here.

Online Shakespeare Fun

-Watch Flocabulary’s Much Ado About Nothing or Macbeth video and ask students to summarize the plot.

-Play Shakespeare online games, including mazes, crosswords, and word searches!

…and even Math??

-Teach students about counting syllables with Sonnets! The Sonnet is a challenging poetry form, but you can modify this classroom resource on group sonnets for the younger crowd by challenging your students write lines with ten syllables.