Family Reunion Readers Theater

Readers Theater is always a fun time, and even more so with my melodramatic stories which are short and funny. But, they are even funnier with a family reunion. As we all know who the hams are in our families, don’t we?

This past holiday season, when our family came together for Thanksgiving as well as Christmas, we did a readers theater three different times (it’s officially a family tradition now!)  What a BLAST! My son made sure he was the director, and he gave out 3-4 books that we all shared. Then he made impromptu costumes that we all … Continue reading

Shakespeare’s Top 10 Dirty Jokes

dirty bard

I work hard to make sure kids find him funny with my Shakespeare for Kids books.  But what’s equally clear to me, teens generally consider Shakespeare boring or “Why is my teacher wasting my life reading this #$%@”  As I have seen on Twitter many times.  But hey, if it’s not presented right, it comes across that there are a lot of big words, most of the language we don’t really understand, and don’t even mention iambic pentameter, what the heck is that?

That being said they don’t realize how funny and ironic he really is. And … Continue reading

#ShakesTag the Online Game of Shakespeare

#ShakesTag

Well today is the day of the week that most people practice religion of one type or another. For some people it’s the church, others football, and to others, reading is religion. Stepping into a slightly tighter niche than that, Shakespeare. And some of these people who love the Bard, get together on Sunday for a friendly game of #ShakesTag.#ShakesTag Continue reading

Celebrity Impersonations of Hamlet’s To be or not to be Speech

Shakespeare with celebrity impersonations

I recently came across a great video through Twitter that is pretty impressive.  Jim Meskimen is a professional impersonator and he spun together a great 2 minute video that’s both engaging and original.  He was able to perform the famous, To be or not to be monologue from Hamlet with about 25 different famous celebrity impersonations.  You can follow Jim on Twitter at: @jimrossmeskimen

You can see the video here:

And Jim has another Shakespeare from celebrity impersonations below.  This one has been seen almost 1 million times!  Not too shabby!

Yo! Shakespeare! The Mini Page Archive

mini page archive

Ok, I had to share this as soon as I heard of it, The Mini Page Archive.  A publication for kids that ran from 1969 – 2007, and it’s all archived and searchable.  It’s a periodical for kids around all sorts of different subjects.  Lucky for us, there are 2 issues focused around Shakespeare:

Each issue is about 4-6 pages and all the short articles are all about Shakespeare.  Whether they are classroom activities, synopses, or even connect-the-dots, it’s … Continue reading

The Lulu App: Engaging Teens and Rating #ShakespeareMen

I recently came across a post about an app called Lulu.  Now, mind you this is not an app for kids or Shakespeare for kids, yet, I’m thinking of this as much more for getting teenagers engaged with Shakespeare.  While reading the article about Lulu and Shakespeare’s male characters, which I thought was pretty funny (mind you, it’s not much of an “article” as it is a list of statements about Shakespeare’s male characters) it got me lulu-logo Continue reading