I love watching how one area of interest always leads the kids onto other topics. I honestly never know where we are going to end up. My daughter’s interest in the Tudors meant she has been reading up on Queen Elizabeth I and a number of her Queen Elizabeth books have mentioned Shakespeare. So she went back and dug out our Life and Time of William Shakespeare book and re-read it. It really is a brilliant book and talks a lot about how different events directed his play writing. The book also includes short extracts from his plays one of which is Romeo and Juliet. And this one immediately caught her attention and she remembered that we had a condensed version of Romeo and Juliet – Romeo and Juliet: Band 18/Pearl (Collins Big Cat)
Now let me start by saying that my daughter is 10 years old and I am planning on covering Shakespeare in the future with her in its proper format and I do not think this book replaces that. HOWEVER this is an introduction to the characters and events of the play. It is written in a very accessible manner and I really do think be reading this now and getting a basic understanding it will make Shakespeare easier for her when we get around to it.
This version is geared towards Key Stage 2 readers and we found it a good version of the play. It covers the basic plot, the key characters and the sequence of events. It is simplified but then it was written as part of a reading series aimed at year 5/ year 6 kids.
Even though she read Romeo and Juliet just for fun and even though it was a condensed version I still thought it would be good to make sure she understood who all the characters were and the sequence of events. I have been spending some time looking around the Secondary resources on the Twinkl website and I remembered seeing some Romeo and Juliet resources so I went back to see if there was anything we could use. And I must admit they do have some interesting Shakespeare resources on the site, it is worth having a look if you are covering one of his plays.
For our purposes I started with the Romeo and Juliet Plot Summary Page.
And then we used the Character place cards (now I know these cards say lower ability but I have actually found that when younger kids are interested in a topic the lower ability cards are actually a great way of introducing them to the topic and then they can build on it. So please don’t be put off by items labelled as lower ability as we thought these cards are great.)
You also might like these Romeo and Juliet sorting cards
After the sorting cards my daughter had a go at a True and False worksheet and we also tried the Plot revision worksheet, although we did the plot revision page slightly differently. We actually cut it into strips and then she had to place the strips in the correct order.
We kept our Romeo and Juliet activities quite brief as I know we will be coming back to cover the play in detail later on and for now I just wanted to make sure she got the key parts correct.
Oh and while she was working on her Romeo and Juliet activities her younger brother read the book – he thought it was good but felt that Romeo was a bit over-dramatic.
Disclosure: Twinkl Resources have given us free access to their website so we can use their resources and share our favourites with you. All Links and References to the subscription packages are correct at the time of me writing this post
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