This awesome article was written by Momma Jo.  Thanks so much for sharing this with us!

Here's an article I wrote for the parents of our homeschool co-op's musical theater students, a class I'm teaching next school year:

Introducing Shakespeare

(Almost) Painlessly

Just the thought of introducing Shakespeare into your homeschool can be intimidating at best, and downright frightening to some. The language is difficult, some of the themes make you blush, and all the talk of witches and fairies and death can be hard to explain to youngsters.  But there is a way to introduce the Bard to your children, and explore these plays that have had such a powerful impact on our world, our language, and our art, in a fun and easy manner.

Step 1. Pick your play

                Starting with Macbeth or Hamlet or King Lear is not a good idea.  Comedies are easier to understand for newbies, especially kids who are sensitive to scary elements in stories.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an excellent place to start, followed by something like The Taming of the Shrew or Twelfth Night.

Step 2. Children’s version of Shakespeare’s plays

                I recommend either Charles Lamb’s version (Tales From Shakespeare which can be found online here: http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/lambtales/LAMBTALE.HTM) or Edith Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories From Shakespeare (which can be found at the Baldwin Project online: www.mainlesson.com ).  Read the children’s version of the play out loud.  Then, if you can find it, get it on tape or CD.  Jim Weiss reads some great ones, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Listen to it in the car and talk about it.  Children’s versions are generally edited for content, and kids get the plot line fixed in their heads this way.

Step 3.  Video adaptations

                My family likes to rent movies, so naturally we gravitate toward the Shakespeare movies by Kenneth Branagh or whatever we can find on Netflix or at the library in the video section.  Often these films have current TV and film actors in them.  We turn on the closed-captioning so we don’t miss anything, and follow along.  Sometimes we still miss things, but knowing what is happening from reading the children’s versions keeps the kids focused and in the loop.  Many times the kids will pause the movie to ask me about what’s going on, or I’ll pause it to discuss something, and occasionally I have to fast forward through an inappropriate romance scene or something.  I’ve found the kids will understand the meaning of unfamiliar words simply from the context, but often we’ll pause to look things up in the ever-present dictionary.

Step 4.  At last!  We’re ready for a live performance!

                Knowing what is going on is key to keeping the kids engaged in the action of a live stage performance of Shakespeare.  We can’t pause, rewind, or turn up the volume.  We can’t turn on the captions.  If someone can’t follow along with the story they will lose interest very quickly.  Don’t attempt a live show without going through the preceding steps!  Especially if the kids are young, it has great potential to end up being a disastrous waste of time.  On the other hand, if done right, this is one of the things your kids will look forward to year after year.  My kids love “Shakespeare Summers,” and we literally devote our summer months to this process of learning to appreciate the Bard.

Recipes around the world: Search the newspaper for recipes from other countries.

Tourist brochures: Check out the entertainment section, look for information about local museums, water parks, zoos, historical parks, theme parks. Have your child  build brochures advertising favorite tourist spots.

Products map: Have child build a mural picturing all the products that are produced in other countries and shipped into the United States. Use information and photographs from the newspaper to develop the murals.

United States-Merchant to the world: Using a world map, have the child mark with arrows the major products that leave the United States and move into other countries. Use the newspaper as a source for this information.

Plant trivia cards: Create a set of trivia flashcards of plants and trees, include the local name, scientific name, and description of the plant or tree

Dream vacations: Use the Travel pages to plan your dream vacation. Use ads to figure out the costs. Draw a map and chart out the stops on your trip.

Comic dialogues: Cut out comic strips from the newspaper. Cut out the dialogue balloons and paste the drawings to white paper. Kids then study the drawings and decide what the characters are saying. They write the new dialogue into the balloons.

A newspaper scavenger hunt from Education World.

Treasure Hunt Activity
 Goal: Find the following information as quickly as possible  the score from a sporting event

•  
• the price of a used car
• a comic strip with an animal
• an editorial cartoon
• the time a movie is starting at a local theater
• today’s weather
• the price of the newspaper
• a column that gives advice
• information about a cultural event
• the name of the editor of the newspaper
• the title of a story which occurred in your local area
• the title of a story that contains the name of a country other than the United States

This lesson, from Education World, teaches different subjects using the newspaper.

Preserving the news! Dissolve a milk of magnesia tablet in a quart of water, and let it stand overnight. Pour the mixture into a flat baking pan large enough to hold the news clippings that you want to preserve. Place the clippings in the solution so they're completely covered by the liquid. Let them soak for an hour. Then take them out and pat them dry. They'll be crisp and new for a long time to come! (This works because the magnesium carbide in the solution neutralizes the acid in the paper; it is the acid that makes the newspaper yellow.)

Listening for details.  Ask your child to listen carefully as you read aloud a story from the day's newspaper.  Then ask questions about details from the story. The higher the grade, the harder (more detailed) questions you can ask. 

News-mapping. Post a map (a community, state, U.S., or world map, depending on the focus of your current events curriculum) . Post stories around the map and string yarn from each story to the location on the map where the story takes place.

More news-mapping. Take a look at the front page of the local newspaper each day. Plot on the map the location of each of the news stories on that page. Invite your child to use the scale of miles on the map to figure out how far each place in the news is from your community. If longitude and latitude is a skill your child is expected to master, he might plot each location's longitude and latitude to the nearest degree.

News scavenger hunts. Provide kids with a list of things to find on the front page of today's newspaper. Kids might hunt in the paper for math-related words and terms (a percent, a measurement of distance, a cost, an address, and a fraction) or grammar-related terms (a present-tense verb, a past-tense verb, a proper noun, an abbreviation, a colon, and a list separated by commas). Or  scavenge the main sports page for a list of sports-related terms. Or hunt for as many nouns (or proper nouns, or verbs) they can find in a story or on the front page. 

A to Z adjectives. Have your child write the letters from A to Z on a sheet of paper. Search the day's front page (or the entire newspaper,  for an adjective that begins with each letter of the alphabet. Kids cut the adjectives from the newspaper and paste them on their list.

Graphing the news. Pull facts from the news that lend themselves to graphing (e.g., the cost of a postage stamp, the population of your community, the number of barrels of oil imported). Provide kids with the information needed and invite them to create a bar, line, or picture graph to depict that information.

Scanning the page. Provide a copy of a news story for this activity that teaches the skill of "skimming for information,"  Provide a list of words from the story/front page and invite students to skim the page to find as many of those words as they can. Set a time limit. Who finds the most words before time runs out?

Abbreviation/acronym search. The names of many common organizations are shortened to their acronym form when used in news stories. For example, the American Broadcasting Corporation becomes ABC, the National Organization for Women becomes NOW, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA. Also, abbreviations are commonly used for state names and some titles, such as Tex. (for Texas) or Sen. (for Senator). Find and create a list of acronyms and abbreviations they find in the daily newspaper.

Local, national, or international? To develop your childs' understanding of a news story's "place," create a bulletin board divided into three sections. Post news stories that might fit into each of the three sections. News of the community or state will be posted in the "Local" section. News of interest around the country will fit in the "National" section. And world news will be posted in the "International" section.

Headline match. Collect ten news stories and separate the story text from the headline. Number each headline from 1 to 10. Assign a letter, from A to J, to each story text. Match each headline to the correct text.

The five Ws. Introduce students to the 5Ws found in most news stories. Often, the five Ws are introduced in a story's opening paragraph. Create an overhead transparency of a major news story. Invite students to talk about the who, where, when, what, and why of the story. Circle or highlight and label the areas of the story that tell each of the five Ws. Then provide your child with a news story and ask them to report to the class the who, where, when, what, and why of the story. Underline each of the five Ws with a different colored crayon.

A five W variation. Provide kids with a news story. The student lists on a separate sheet of paper the who, where, when, what, and why of the story. Then the students' papers are collected and redistributed so no student has his or her own sheet. Each students takes a look at their five W list and writes the opening paragraph of a news story based on that information. At the end of the activity, students share their stories and the original stories to see how they compare. How accurate were the students' stories?

Sequencing the facts. Select a news story that includes a clear sequence of events. Write each of the facts of the story on a separate strip of paper. Invite students to order the sentence strips to tell the story in its correct sequence. (Option: Once you've done this activity, you might invite students to do the same thing. They can retell the events of a story in five simple sentences, each written on a separate strip of paper. Then each student shares the activity he/she created and a copy of the original story with another student, who gets to try the activity.)

Why is it news? Each day, newspaper editors around the world must make decisions about which stories they will publish. Stories make it into newspapers for many different reasons. Invite students to look at the stories that have made the front page of a local newspaper during the last few days and to talk about why each of those stories made headlines. Among the reasons students might come up with are these:

• Timeliness -- News that is happening right now, news of interest to readers right now.
• Relevance -- The story happened nearby or is about a concern of local interest.
• Magnitude -- The story is great in size or number; for example, a tornado that destroys a couple houses might not make the news but a story about a tornado that devastates a community would be very newsworthy.
• Unexpectedness -- Something unusual, or something that occurs without warning.
• Impact -- News that will affect a large number of readers.
• Reference to someone famous or important -- News about a prominent person or personality.
• Oddity -- A unique or unusual situation.
• Conflict -- A major struggle in the news.
• Reference to something negative -- Bad news often "sells" better than good news.
• Continuity -- A follow-up or continuation to a story that has been in the news or is familiar.
• Emotions -- Emotions (such as fear, jealousy, love, or hate) increase interest in a story.
• Progress -- News of new hope, new achievement, new improvements.

In the days ahead, study each front-page story and talk about why editors decided to put the story on page one. Which reason(s) on the students' list would explain the newsworthiness of the story?

Voice your opinion. Set up a tape recorder in a convenient location in the classroom. Pose to students an opinion question and let them think about it for a few days. When students are ready, they can take turns expressing their opinions to the recorder. This can be a little less threatening for some students than talking in front of a class would be. Later in the week, once all students have had a chance to express their opinions, you might begin a class discussion of the question by playing back the tape or by sharing select opinions that you cull from it.

Charting the weather. The weather page in the newspaper can be the starting point for many great classroom activities. The class might follow the local weather for a week or a month and create charts and graphs to show the ups and downs of temperatures. Or each student might follow the weather of a different city in the United States (or the world) for a set period. Students can use the collected information to compare weather (high and low temperatures, total precipitation, sky conditions, etc.) in different places.

Create historical newspapers. Challenge students to create a newspaper about a period of time they are studying. If students are studying U.S. history, they might include stories such as "Pilgrims and Indians Gather for Feast" and "Lincoln Wins Election." The stories relate the facts as students have researched them. Students should include each of the five Ws in their first paragraphs.

Plan a healthful menu. After a study of nutrition, invite students to plan a healthful menu for a day. Provide three paper plates for each student; each plate represents a different meal -- breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Invite students to find and cut out from newspapers, magazines, store ads, etc., pictures of foods and to arrange them into healthful meals on the three plates. Invite students to share the results, which will make a colorful and attractive bulletin board!

You be the editor. Rewrite a news story to include ten errors of punctuation, capitalization, or grammar.  Invite students to "edit" your story free of errors!

If you are participating in the Unplugged Project, this week's theme is newspapers. Here are some ideas to try:

Read and write for meaning. Remove the headlines from a number of news stories. Display the headline-less stories on a classroom bulletin board. Provide students with the headlines, and ask them to match each to one of the stories. As students replace the missing headlines, ask them to point out the words in the headlines that helped them find the correct story. Then distribute headlines from less prominent stories and ask students to choose one and write a news story to go with it. When the stories have been completed, provide each student with the story that originally accompanied the headline. Ask: How close was your story to the original? How effectively did the headline convey the meaning of the story? You might follow up this activity by asking students to write a headline for their favorite fairy tale.

Read a map. Arrange students into groups, and assign each group one international story in the news. Have students explore Maps in the News and choose a map related to their assigned story. Ask students to use the map to answer some or all of these questions:

1. In what city did the story take place?
2. What country is that city in?
3. What is the capital of that country?
4. What language is spoken there?
5. What continent is the country part of?
6. What countries or bodies of water border the country on the north, south, east, and west?
7. What physical characteristics of the country might have contributed to the events in the story?
8. What effect might the event or series of events have on the physical characteristics of the country?

Understand the media. Distribute advertisements cut from newspapers, and ask students to list the products in order, according to the appeal of the ads. Create a chart showing how students rated each product. Then distribute a list of the following propaganda techniques:

• Bandwagon -- the implication that "everybody else is doing it."
• Plain folks -- the implication that "users of this product are just like you."
• Card stacking -- distorting or omitting facts.
• Name-calling -- stereotyping people or ideas.
• Glittering generalities -- using "good" labels, such as patriotic, beautiful, exciting, that are unsupported by facts.
• Testimonial -- an endorsement by a famous person.
• Snob appeal -- the implication that only the richest, smartest, or most important people are doing it.
• Transference -- the association of a respected person with a product or idea.

Discuss each ad, and determine the propaganda technique(s) used. Ask: Which techniques were most effective? Which were least effective? What factors, such as gender, geographic location, or age, might have influenced the effectiveness of each technique? As a follow-up to the activity, you might ask students to design their own ads using one of the propaganda techniques studied.

Arrange in sequence. Cut up some popular comic strips, provide each student with one complete strip, and ask students to put the comics back in the correct order. Or arrange students into groups, provide each group with several cut-up strips from the same comic, and ask them to separate the panels into strips and arrange the strips in the correct order. Then introduce older students to a series of stories about an ongoing news event, and ask them to arrange the stories in the order in which they appeared. Encourage them to use the stories to create a news time line.

Expand your vocabulary. Assign each student a letter of the alphabet. Ask students to browse through the newspaper, find five unfamiliar words beginning with the assigned letter, and look up the definition of each. Then have each student create and illustrate a dictionary page containing the five words and their meanings. Combine the pages into a classroom dictionary. In a variation of this activity, you might ask students to look in the newspaper for any of the following:

• words with a particular suffix or prefix
• words containing a particular vowel sound or consonant blend
• compound words
• words in the past, present, and future tenses
• possessives
• plurals

Older students might look for examples of similes, metaphors, irony, hyperbole, and satire.

Explore geography. Ask each student to search the newspaper for stories that illustrate each of the five themes of geography -- location, place, human interaction and the environment, movement and communication, and regions. Display the stories on a classroom bulletin board labeled with the five geography themes.

Hunt for classified math. Ask students to use classified pages of the newspaper to do the following:

• calculate the average price of a 1985 Cadillac
• find what fraction of the newspaper is composed of classified ads
• figure out the cost of running a 30-word ad for one week
• estimate the total number of classified ads (based on ads per column and columns per page)
• compare bank interest rates and determine the most and least interest $100 would earn in one year in your area
• find what percentage of job openings start with T. As a follow-up to this activity, ask each student to create a classified ad and exchange it with a classmate. Ask: Was all the necessary information included? If not, what was missing?

Sort and classify. Label each of seven shoe boxes with one of the following newspaper categories: News, Editorials, Features, Humor, Advertising, Sports, and Entertainment. Ask students to cut out the newspaper stories they read each day and put each one in the appropriately labeled shoe box. At the end of the week, have students skim as many of the stories as possible and write an adjective describing each on index cards attached to each box. You might suggest adjectives such as factual, sad, inspiring, opinionated, misleading, silly, serious, and biased. Discuss and compare the adjectives. What conclusions can students reach about each category based on those words?

Play a current events game. Make a list of five categories that might be created using the newspaper, such as Countries, Weather Events, Mathematical Symbols, Movies, and Technology Terms. Ask students to search the newspaper for information related to each category and to write a question based on the information they find. (Remind students to make a note of the answers to their questions.) Arrange students into teams, and use the question-and-answer combinations to play a Jeopardy type of current events game.

Make papier-mâché. Finally, when you've done everything else you can think of with your newspaper, don't throw it away. Make papier- mâché! Here's how:

• Make a paste by mixing together 1/2 cup of flour and 2 cups of cold water. Add the paste to 2 cups of boiling water and return to a boil. Remove from heat and stir in 3 tablespoons of sugar. Let the mixture cool and thicken. You can also make a quick no-cook paste by simply adding water to flour until it forms a soupy mix. (Since flour-based pastes get moldy over time, you might want to use powdered wallpaper paste mixed with water for a longer-lasting creation.)
• Tear newspaper into narrow strips, and dip the strips into the paste, coating them completely. Squeeze out excess paste and drape the strips over a mold, such as a balloon or shaped chicken wire, overlapping the edges.
• Apply as many layers as necessary, allowing each layer to dry before putting on another layer.

These ideas are from Education World.

If your child is reading high school literature, here are some study guide sites to help them. These sites will also help with planning an American, British, or World Literature class.

Pink Monkey has over 454 study guides, booknotes, summaries, etc. http://www.pinkmonkey.com/

Spark Notes has online novel study guides, test prep, and more: http://www.sparknotes.com/

Cliffs Notes has free online study guides. http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/

Grade Saver has free online study guides of many books.  http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/

Glencoe Literature has study guides to lots of books. http://www.glencoe.com/sec/literature/litlibrary/

Schools of California offers many literature lesson/activity units for grades k-12. http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/cyberguide.html

The Educator's Network also has many study guides for novels. http://www.theeducatorsnetwork.com/main/units/literature.htm

Unit Studies.com offers a free Shakespeare unit. http://www.unitstudies.com/Freeguides/shakespeare.aspx

Study and Writing guides for essays can be found here: http://www.studygs.net/essayterms.htm

Web English Teacher has activities to help your student learn to write about literature. http://www.studygs.net/essayterms.htm

Trying to find a quotation to put into your essay?  Bartleby has many to choose from: http://www.bartleby.com/

The Baldwin Online Children's Literacy Project has many classic books that you can read on the web. http://www.mainlesson.com/

The Electronic Text Center has many online classic books. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html

Creative Writing Ideas:

1 Keep a "diary" from the perspective of one of the characters.. .. pick a character and then throughout the book, write journal entries based on how she thinks that character feels, what they might have seen in a day, things they may have done, foods they may have eaten, etc.For The Magician's Nephew, Digory or Polly would work.. Then from Lion, Prince Caspian AND Dawn Treader, she could do Lucy or Edmund (Peter and Susan for the first 2, but if she'd like to stick with one character for more books, the younger two might be better, and thn she could even work in things like "this reminds me of when we were here and Peter was High King and we ..." ... The Horse and His Boy, she could do any of the characters, etc...

2. Write a newspaper article concerning a particular event that occurs in the book, and include "interviews" from characters and even un-named bystanders.. .

3.. Write a travel brochure for some of the different places in the books...

4. Change the ending to the story

5. Write a fantasy story of her own in the same style.

6. Write about what she would have done if she was in one of the character's position in an event that happened to them, likeEdmond with the White Witch.

7. Write poems from the perspectives of the different characters.

8. Write your own allegory about a different part of the Bible.

9. Create a story about your own world. Create a world with your own characters and the like.

Use this link for some of the following activities:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - TeacherVision. com

Marketing Mania
Create a kid's meal package for a fast-food restaurant to promote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Decorate it with scenes from the book. Design a toy that would be included with the meal as a free gift.

TV Time
Create a TV advertisement to promote the kid's fast food meal described above. Write a script and videotape the commercial.

Fantasy Photos
Make a picture scrapbook of fantasy characters from books, nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and television (Old Mother Hubbard, The Wizard of Oz characters, Peter Piper, Snow White, etc.).

Movie vs. Book
There have been several movie versions of this book. Watch one and discuss the similarities and differences between the book and movie.

Flying High
Make a banner or flag for Narnia. Try to highlight characters, places, and events from the story.

Your Own Fantasy World
Imagine you slipped through a secret passage into another world. Make up a fantasy about meeting someone there. Write about what happens and how you get back.

Character Traits
What are some individual character traits of each of the four children: Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy? How do they change over the course of the story? Compare yourself to the characters in the book. What are the simmilarities and differences?

Imagery
This book is full of marvelously, descriptive passages written in vivid language. Illustrate your favorite passage.

Use these links for lesson plans and other activities:

C. S. Lewis Teacher Resource Page
Into the Wardrobe :: a C. S. Lewis web site
C. S. Lewis, for love of Narnia, homeschoolers, "FRIENDS OF NARNIA" curriculum

Chronicles of Narnia Study Guides and Lesson Plans

About.com: http://www.easyfunschool.com/ article1932. html
The Chronicles of Narnia  (this is geared to upper elementary or middle school)