Hawaiian Students' Take on Falstaff
A number of months ago I was contacted by Lanaly Cabalo, a teacher from Roosevelt High School in Honolulu. She teaches a number of classes there and introduced some of her students to Kill Shakespeare this past semester and they - along with some other teachers - really took to it and did a number of papers and art projects on the series.
The artwork project above was done by Mehana Verdadero, a junior at the high school. She - quite obviously - really enjoys our take on Falstaff and wrote a paper on him as well. A snippet from her report:"Even though there are many great characters, Falstaff is one of the best. Why? Well, if you love comedy, then you will totally love him. He is the funniest character in all the King Henry plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor... Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col changed him into a man of faith and wisdom, but they didn’t change the fact that he is the funniest character... in their book “Kill Shakespeare.”We love receiving messages and images like this from teachers. So keep up the great work Ms. Cabalo, Mehana, and everyone else in the class. It was a pleasure creating the series and we loved hearing how much your class enjoyed it. And if we find ourselves in that part of the country we'd love to swing by and visit!UPDATE (Jan 4/11): Another student from the class - Simeon Crawford - sent their project to us - it's right here!:
Kill Shakespeare Secret Diaries
As we have mentioned we really get jazzed when we find out that teachers and students are using Kill Shakespeare as a way to explore the Bard.
One of our fave teachers is Deborah Altenbeck who teaches at an institute for gifted children in Essen, Germany. Deborah has been teaching Kill Shakespeare as part of one of her courses.Deborah has generated several cool lesson plans and walked the students through the first few issues of the series.
One of the homework assignments she gave to her class was to take a Kill Shakespeare character and write a "secret" diary for them. The results were a lot of fun and Deborah shared some of them with us and we wanted to pass them on to you.So here you go - this first entry is from Richard III's POV and is done by Luise (and remember English is the second, third or fourth language for these students).Dear diary,We’re gonna stop Shakespeare. He is an evil guy, I know that. And with Hamlet’s help we’re gonna kill him. I hate that Shakespeare guy so much! I also need Lady Macbeth. She’s somehow creepy and seems clever although she’s just a woman. I think I have to be careful with her. Everybody knows what she’d done to her husband. Some even say she killed the English king… If she killed a king once, she can kill one a second time. But I’m much cleverer than her. I mean she’s just a woman!The Syna wrote this diary from Lady M's perspective:Today, everything was just perfect! I persuaded my friendly and thankfully not very intelligent partner to accomplish my plan! I hope he won’t be too awkward, but hopefully, he will appreciate what I want him to do… But all in all, my plan is really delightful – it is just perfect! I really take pride in myself! One day, everything will be wonderful!And finally Jonathan got into the act, also as Richard:Dear diary, Today Hamlet finally got to my land. Yesterday, the stars shone in very strange colors and I hoped that it would mean that the prophecy will be fulfilled. This morning I found the Shadow King, Hamlet, at the beach. I'm very glad that now the prophecy will be fulfilled by him. The only thing I'm depressed about is that Hamlet doesn't want to hear anything about this prophecy and the fact that only he himself can kill Shakespeare. Yours, RichardFor our teacher friends Deborah has shared three of her lesson plans -- given that English is not her students first language I think that the content is probably appropriate for junior high school students. If you are interested let us know as we'd love to share these with you and spread ideas of how you can teach Shakespeare, and Kill Shakespeare, in fun ways.And as always we love to hear how teachers are teaching the Bard in their own classes.All the best,Conor and Anthony