Artistic Ways to Learn Shakespeare’s The Tempest
There are many ways that you can teach Shakespeare in a fun way, we focused on The Tempest this year for Shakespeare week. A lot of resources are on the Shakespeare Week website including the instructions we used to build characters from The Tempest out of LEGO. It was actually the first thing we did knowing nothing about the story.
We happened to make two characters that fit together really well – Miranda and Ferdinand. This was really down to luck as they were the ones that we could find the pieces for.
When it comes to art there’s loads of things you can do as there are many different ways you can think of art and adapt it – whether it be the basic drawing cartoons or maybe even making the costumes. Find what it is that your child likes and utilise it.
Other artistic ways to learn about Shakespeare’s The Tempest were colouring in a Caliban mask , making finger puppets of The Tempest characters or you could make The Tempest scene.
Fun Ways to Understand Shakespeare’s The Tempest
To understand the story there are many different forms from the original text, to more simple versions, a cartoon or in our case fun Tempest Cartoon videos from the BBC website
Once we had an idea of the story I made a word search of the main characters and then we made a family tree so we could work out who all the characters were in relation to each other.
We were then going to act out the play of The Tempest but others were unavailable. Our son instead did a quiz and had learned so much from the previous fun activities that he was really enthusiastic to answer the questions.
These activities are suitable for a younger audience or as an introduction to an older one. To move further you could introduce writing a love poem including why Miranda or Ferdinand love each other, and how they feel about what is occurring. Or maybe write a diary from the perspective of one of the characters.
Can you think of other fun ways to learn about Shakespeare’s The Tempest?
We mean to get around to remaking this boat inspired by RedTedArt/.
