Clio has taught education courses at the college level and has a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction.
Though Shakespeare's language and themes can be challenging, students often enjoy them once they become engaged with his classic works. If you are working on A Midsummer Night's Dream with your students, hands-on activities can help them engage with the themes of this play.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy that deals with themes like love and romance, intergenerational conflict, and the line between reality and fantasy. It also looks at the nature of pride and the importance of being able to laugh at yourself. The activities in this lesson will help maximize your students' appreciation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Doing these activities before your students begin the play will help activate and enhance their prior knowledge.
In general, students will get more out of their reading of Shakespeare's works if they are able to put them in context. Break your students into small groups and ask each group to focus on one major question about Shakespeare. For instance, students might explore:
Each group should research the answers to their questions and prepare a poster for sharing their findings with the class.
Ask your students to draw what they picture when they hear the word fairy. Let them be creative, but also think about what preconceptions they have about what a fairy is. Use their drawings to lead into a discussion about how fairies are presented in popular culture and play; you can reference these preconceptions as students work through the play.
The activities in this section will help your students monitor their comprehension as they move through the play.
Designate one wall of your classroom to be a character web. Each time students encounter a new character, write the character's name on an index card and affix it to the wall. Students should write characteristics of this character on cards and surround the name with the characteristics. They can then use colorful yarn to show the ways that different characters are related to one another. The web should be interactive and students should continue adding to it as they learn more about each character.
After students read a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, break them into small groups. Make sure there are enough people in each group to assign one to each part and leave someone in the position of director. Have them practice acting out the scene according to the director's interpretation. Then, have students perform the scene for the class. Facilitate a discussion about how different directors might make the same scene convey a really different meaning or mood. Repeat this activity occasionally over the course of students' reading of the play.
Finally, these activities help students consolidate all they learned from the reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Ask students to work in small groups to use clay, cardboard or other building materials to make a model depicting a particularly meaningful scene from the play. After they create a model, they should write a brief essay explaining the scene they focused on, the decisions they made in creating their model, and the themes that were raised in this particular segment of the play. Let students share their models and writing with each other.
Have students get into Puck's shoes and write a letter to Titania, apologizing for the tremendous trick that was played on her in the play. Puck might justify his action or simply apologize, depending on your students' interpretation of his character.
Ask your students to work in groups to choose contemporary actors to play roles in an imaginary modern film of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Let them create a mock website for their version of the movie, and make sure they justify their selections using evidence from the play.
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