The RSC Shakespeare Toolkit for Primary Teachers

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Description

Developed by one of the world's leading theatre companies, this fantastic resource offers teachers a practical, drama-based approach to teaching and appreciating three of Shakespeare's most popular plays: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The toolkit brings the plays alive as performance pieces, with pupils undertaking drama-based explorations of the text that take them through much of the play. Teachers' notes and accompanying photocopiable worksheets offer a lesson-by-lesson teaching route through each of the three plays in turn. The schemes of work offer teachers a route through each play that has been designed to be flexible and to bolt on to what they already teach. The schemes comprise a series of lessons that can either be followed in their entirety as a stand-alone scheme of work or which can be dipped into by teachers wanting to augment their existing schemes of work.

Reviews

'What a welcome the Shakespeare 'toolkit for teachers' will be for students who are sick of poring over the texts, trying to decode the language.' -- The Independent (January 2010)
'...combines accessible practical ways of playing with Shakespeare's text with the intellectual rigour and active approaches which are part of the RSC's rehearsal process.' -- Youth Theatre News (January 2010)
It really does put plenty of tools' in your kit' and gives you lots (and lots) of routes right into the play you are working on... Everything, including dozens of worksheets, can be legally photocopied for distribution to the class. Probably more convenient for most teachers is the CD-ROM which provides all the teacher notes, resource sheets and worksheets as printable PDFs along with extra image and text resources for some lessons.' -- Teaching Drama (May 2010)
'This toolkit is essential to bring the Bard to life' -- The Teacher (September 2010)

Author Bio

Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is one of the world's leading theatre companies, originally formed in 1879 as the company of Stratford-upon-Avon's newly opened Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; it was incorporated by royal charter in 1925. The name of the theatre was changed in 1961 to the 'Royal Shakespeare Theatre' and the company then adopted its present title. Peter Hall was the new company's first director. Although the RSC now stages a wide variety of plays in its five auditoria, the company remains faithful to its prime role - performing the works of Shakespeare. The original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1926 and replaced by the present building, which opened in 1932. The company established its first London base in 1960, at the Aldwych Theatre, followed by The Warehouse, a studio theatre opened in 1977. In 1982 both operations were transferred to the new Barbican Centre in the City of London. Meanwhile, Stratford had seen the opening of its own studio theatre, the Other Place, in 1974. In 1986 the Elizabethan-style Swan Theatre, built inside the shell of the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre's auditorium, came into use. In 2001 artistic director Adrian Noble announced a precipitate withdrawal from the company's London base at the Barbican and unveiled a radical blueprint for the future; this involved shorter contracts for actors, a complete organizational shake-up, and the demolition and rebuilding of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The hostile reaction to these ideas, which many saw as undermining the ensemble basis of the company, led to Noble's resignation a year later. His successor, Michael Boyd, announced a more modest plan to cut running costs and to develop and refurbish the Stratford theatre. In 2006-07 the company oversaw a project involving the production of all Shakespeare's plays in the course of a single year. Recent years have also seen several triumphant returns to the West End.