One Thing: Shakespeare

Good morrow, gentle readers:
Yesterday I started teaching a One Thing: Shakespeare workshop through Julie Bogart's excellent homeschool language arts resource, Brave Writer. I think we must have at least thirty families signed up (Lisa sent me a class list today) to explore Shakespeare together. My main audience for the class is the moms whom I will be teaching some cool ways to integrate the study of Shakespeare's works into their language arts programs, hopefully making the Bard's works fun and accessible for them and their students. This week we'll be focusing on background about Shakespeare's life (done in a treasure hunt format -- Julie's idea) and a creative family project on Elizabethan theatre. Next week we'll be tackling sonnets, and after that we'll be working with scenes from Much Ado About Nothing as well as watching the Branagh version of the play. It should make for a very enjoyable month.

Now that I finished with the grammar tutorials for the class at Cuyamaca and my Heritage students are working on their MLA research papers due in late May and mid-June, I have time for teaching Shakespeare, if only for the month of May. It's been a crazy semester with all of these classes going at one time or another, plus students to tutor and my own four to teach. But it's been good, too, to get back into teaching, to help students with knotty writing issues, to facilitate discussions and throw around ideas. I feel rather like I'm coming out of my cocoon of the past five years of illness, yet I'm also burning the candle at both ends with late nights, early mornings, and often no time for my late afternoon naps. (And that doesn't count the art council activities of the next two months, either!) I do admit that I'm looking forward to this summer very much ... a time to rest, relax, read, and, I hope, WRITE.

So I'll be enjoying the Bard very much as we will be working in rather close proximity during the month of May which is always Shakespeare month at Brave Writer. I'll keep you posted as to how the class is going, but I am very encouraged after my first official day as a Shakespeare instructor for Brave Writer (back as a full-fledged teacher there for the first time in five years, I believe).

Your "Lady Disdain," Susanne