Shakespeare: The Perfect Platform for Kinesthetic Learning in ELA

“Papaya papaya papaya!” 10th graders whispered, marveled, hissed, threatened, and pleaded as they stalked, darted, and slunk around our classroom, staring and gesticulating. If you’d walked by earlier this week, you’d have been excused for wondering what was going on.

We are having way too much fun with Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be precise. Nothing quite like dissecting the follies of infatuation with 16-year-olds in May.

Because drama was meant to be seen and not read, and because our final project is a presentation for another 10th grade class, we do a lot of acting and a lot of working on acting. I have a few standard exercises, like reviewing the previous scene with a 1-minute fast-forward, no sound summary; discussing the different stories implied by emphasizing each different word in a sentence like “I love you” or “I didn’t say you lied”; doing staged whole-group readings or reading in table groups. 

This year I added a new exercise. I call it the minion exercise. I came up with it to get students to strain their imagination to utilize all the means of interpretation at their disposal in addition to vocal expression—including facial expression, gestures, body language, and movement on stage. I gave them 2 lines: “She sees not Hermia. Hermia, sleep thou there, and never mayst thou come Lysander near.” Then I asked them to do the following:

1. Paraphrase in modern English, like “[to Helena’s retreating back] She doesn’t see Hermia. [to Hermia’s sleeping figure] Hermia, stay sleeping there, and I hope you never come near me again.” 
2. Now stage it, speaking the paraphrase. Now you understand what exactly the language means and what you would naturally do while saying it. But what you say in Shakespeare’s language will be gobbledegook to your audience, so they will depend almost entirely on your vocal and physical interpretation to decipher it. 
3. So now, act those lines again, but the only words you may say are “papaya.” All your meaning must come from your vocal and physical interpretation. 

The result was hysterical. There was too much action happening to capture it on my camera, but the staged scenes the following day were much more active than previously. And today, after the love polygons have transformed several times, as students staged the reading of act 4 scene 1 with a cat fight between the girls and a bragging battle between the guys, the students in their seats were so involved they were shouting from their seats “Oh, burn!” before I even explained the insults. 

Much of the time it is a challenge to figure out how to incorporate kinesthetic learning into English class. Shakespeare—or any drama—is the natural opportunity to get moving and have fun.

How do you use kinesthetic learning in ELA? Or, how do you transform the groan at announcing a Shakespeare unit to energy, fun, and learning?

P.S. For more on my "Finding Love" unit focusing on A Midsummer Night's Dream, see this blog on questions, this on assessments, this on letting my inner nerd show, and this on connecting the play to life.