Sarah (00:00:08):
You’re listening to the Read Aloud Revival podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Mackenzie, homeschooling mama of six and author of The Read Aloud Family and Teaching From Rest. As parents were overwhelmed with a lot to do, it feels like every child needs something different. The good news is, you are the best person to help your kids learn and grow and home is the best place to fall in love with books.
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This podcast has been downloaded 7 million times in over 160 countries. If you want to nurture warm relationships while also raising kids who love to read, you’re in good company. We’ll help your kids fall in love with books and we’ll help you fall in love with homeschooling. Let’s get started.
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Well, hello, hello. You’ve got Episode 171 of the Read Aloud Revival podcast. I’m so glad you’re here today. What we’re talking about on today’s show is how to introduce your kids to Shakespeare. A couple of weeks ago, I had the absolute delight of chatting on a live video stream with Ken Ludwig. He’s a world renowned playwright and the author of How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, which is a book I love and use all the time in my own homeschool. We talked during our live stream about why Shakespeare is foundational to a great education and what are the simplest ways to get started even if you’re not familiar with much of Shakespeare’s work yourself or really any of it. What if you’re intimidated? What if you’ve never read Shakespeare? What if you don’t know where to start?
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Well, you’re going to walk away from this today knowing just what to do first and how completely simple and delightful it can be to introduce your kids of all ages to the Bard. We’re going to answer questions like, “Why should I teach Shakespeare when there’s so many other things to do in my school day?” Or, “What play should I start with? And what’s the simplest way to begin? What if I have absolutely no prior knowledge of Shakespeare or I don’t know what something in the play means?”
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It was such a great conversation and so inspiring. We heard a lot of feedback from people who joined us for the livestream or watched the video recording, saying they just loved it, including this note from Stacey. She wrote, “I have to admit, I didn’t think I would resonate with this but I totally want to learn more after viewing. So thank you.” Well, I understand Stacey because I can’t help it either. Every time I talk to Ken Ludwig or hear him speak, I want to do all the Shakespeare things with my kids even the plays I’ve not read, I think you’re going to understand if you keep listening.
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So it was such a great conversation. We wanted to make sure you didn’t miss it, which is why we’re putting that whole livestream, we pulled the audio from it and we’re putting it up today on this podcast for you here. So you get to hear the whole thing right here on the show in just a moment.
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Now, just a quick heads up. This is excellent no matter how old your kids are. So if you’ve got three and four-year-olds, yes, you’re going to find out how you can introduce Shakespeare to your three and four-year-olds, it’s pretty fun. And you’re also going to find out what you can do with your teenagers. So there’s something for the whole family here. And that’s what’s really excellent about Ken Ludwig’s method of teaching Shakespeare. It’s a whole family thing and you know how much we love that around here at Read Aloud Revival.
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So, okay, first a couple of quick things, the books and resources that we mentioned during this conversation, they’re all collected in today’s show notes. Those are at readaloudrevival.com/171. That includes Ken’s excellent book, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare. That’s the first thing readaloudrevival.com/171. And then the second thing I wanted to mention is that it is that time of year again when homeschooling conferences are right around the corner. Now of course, our conference season got cut short last year because of COVID. But the great homeschool conventions are planning on happening in 2021.
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GHC is going to be following health and safety guidelines in each location they’re at and I’m going to be at every one they’re open for. I would love to have you join me for my sessions. I’m doing one on Teaching From Rest: Unshakeable Peace for the homeschooling mom and I’m doing another on Raising Kids Who Love to Read. And then of course, I’m going to be joining my friends and fellow podcasters and homeschooling mamas Pam Barnhill and Collin Kessler. We do a mom to mom panel with Q&A about everything where you can ask anything from troublesome toddlers to stopping math tears to how to get dinner on the table. We’re doing a Q&A session and we’re also doing our special event real mom tour, which is a special mom’s night in with lots of laughter and light.
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We were so excited to do this in 2020 and it got cut short. So we are doing it this year. We’re excited about it. You can join us at any great homeschool convention around the country, get details and your tickets at greathomeschoolconventions.com. If you purchased a ticket for 2020 by the way, that ticket is transferred to 2021. I can’t wait to see you there if I missed you last year. Okay, let’s go right to our conversation with Ken Ludwig and get all fired up about Shakespeare.
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He is a Tony and an Olivier Award winning playwright. He’s written 28 plays and musicals, including six on Broadway, that Broadway that you’re thinking of, that one. I think seven in London’s West End. His plays have been performed in over 30 countries in 20 different languages. They feature actors like Alec Baldwin and Carol Burnett, Lynn Redgrave, John Collins, lots of others. And during not pandemic times, his plays are performed somewhere in the United States every night of the year which is pretty spectacular. I am a huge fan of his book, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare. It was named the best Shakespeare book of the year. It’s my own favorite resource for doing Shakespeare with all of my kids from my seven-year-old, all the way up through to my teenagers and high schoolers.
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Like I mentioned, if you missed it at the very beginning, to celebrate our conversation today, Random House has dropped the price on the ebook, pretty much everywhere you can grab an ebook, so it’s only $3. Make sure by the time we’re done today that you go grab that if you haven’t yet, because that’s a great deal. I’m just delighted to have you here. Ken, welcome, welcome. We are so excited for this conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:06:58):
Oh, Sara, thank you so much. I just love talking to you. Happiest time of mine ever. I’m just thrilled to do this. Especially during the time we’re all in our own homes and it’s hard to get out. This is great. Thanks for having me.
Sarah (00:07:12):
Yes, absolutely. Just delighted. And I’m really excited about this topic in particular because I think for a lot of us, we would love to introduce our kids to Shakespeare. It feels kind of intimidating. Maybe the way we were introduced to Shakespeare when we were students ourselves wasn’t super inspiring. Maybe we never really understood it. That happens to me lots when I’m reading. We’re going to talk about it too. Yeah, I feel like we should start with a more obvious question. Which is why? Why do Shakespeare at all? Why teach Shakespeare?
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Those of us especially right now, everybody’s pretty much teaching their kids at home. All of us here today always teach our kids at home. There’s a lot to get to. So why should we make time for Shakespeare in the schedule?
Speaker 2 (00:07:53):
Well, that’s a great question. That’s the central question. Because we have so many competing things. There’s so much on television and video. Why take a little time out to learn a little bit of Shakespeare? And you said the right thing. You only have to start with a little bit, just a little taste of it and it starts opening doors. So I was thinking about this question, this afternoon and I actually thought my five answers to this question. Why should we spend time with Shakespeare? Why introduce your kids to it? First of all, look, it is completely central to Western civilization. Central in a way that nothing else is except the Bible. The two great sources of the English language as we speak it now are the King James Version of the Bible and Shakespeare and they were created within 20 years of each other.
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How can you go through literature since Shakespeare without knowing some Shakespeare? Jane Austen was his biggest fan and is enriched by Shakespeare. It’s [inaudible 00:09:03]. When you read Jane Austen and then you start recognizing passages from Shakespeare right off the bat. In Northanger Abbey, she quotes a passage of Shakespeare. Dickens, movies, movies, archetypes that he’s taught us about, Star Wars, The Godfather. All literature in the English language stems from Shakespeare. It’s hard to be literate. Just the way we know from the Bible who Moses is and we talk about Moses, well, we need to be able to speak with knowledge about let’s see, who are Romeo and Juliet again? Who is Macbeth? These are part of our DNA. If we don’t know them, not only are our lives less rich, but we can’t really be literate in the same way. That’s number one.
Sarah (00:10:06):
Yeah, it’s like a cultural literacy, I think is what I’m hearing you say. Because these allusions to Romeo and Juliet or, “To be, or not to be,” from Hamlet or whatever, they come up in a lot of different places in our lives. So understanding where they come from ends up being kind of a cultural vocabulary, I think.
Speaker 2 (00:10:25):
It does, it does. Very well put. We need this cultural literacy to be able to read intelligently and it also adds another level to what we read. When we know that Austen or Dickinson are using Shakespeare’s ideas and characters and names and words and passages, it enriches us because they’re doing it. It’s because it rebounds in people’s minds with what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” is very Shakespearean. That’s Dickens. That’s the beginning of a Tale of Two Cities. Another reason is that it really literally makes us better readers and better writers. You can’t write plays if you don’t know about Shakespeare. It makes us better students and it makes us better test takers.
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I say that really very aware of the sort of important meaning of that in this sense. This book, while I call it How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare has another title in the back of my mind, I call it the stealth title. The stealth title is how to teach yourself Shakespeare. Because so many of us go through life and Shakespeare seems frightening. It’s just frightening. We read a line. I’ll just pick one out of the air, “These are the forgeries of jealousy.” That’s something that Titania says in Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’s a great fairy queen and it’s a big moment and there’s thunder and lightning and she’s arguing with her husband, Oberon.
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And she says, “Our argument is coming out of jealousy. These are the forgeries of jealousy.” Just the way he expresses himself can be frightening because it’s like a different language.
Sarah (00:12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:12:34):
This is for parents and adults as well as for children, because it’s meant to break the barrier into feeling comfortable with Shakespeare. Now, the reason I mentioned that is… But my other comment I just said about why do this is is it makes us better students, this is for your kids. And it makes them better test takers. And it makes them better readers because they have to learn to read slowly and understand every word they read. That’s how you conquer Shakespeare.
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It teaches you to understand levels of meaning, it teaches you… I want to get to my… Well, the next big point I was going to make is that it teaches you morality. Shakespeare teaches you morality. Let me stop off to the one other point I want to make and then let me get back to morality which is literacy as you said, is the language of Shakespeare, just the way the characters and the themes are part of our cultural literacy, the way in the Bible, Moses, would use Moses and Rebecca or Joshua or whoever are part of our literacy, so is Shakespeare in the sense of the words.
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I printed something out here. There’s a wonderful piece. It’s hard to see there, but you can see it’s about one long paragraph and it’s by a Shakespeare scholar named Bernard Levin. And Bernard Levin in talking about how much Shakespeare has invented that we use every day of our lives wrote this long passage and if I just read the first four lines, you’ll get the point.
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“If you cannot understand my argument and declare it’s Greek to me, you’re quoting Shakespeare. If you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you’re quoting Shakespeare. If you recall your salad days, you’re quoting Shakespeare. If you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is farther to the thought, if your last property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare.” He goes on and on and on and on with one wonderful phrase and word after another that were invented by Shakespeare.
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That’s where our language comes from. So our sense of literacy in the English language all goes back to Shakespeare. So you want to know even a little about him, who he was maybe but certainly how to read a short passage of Shakespeare which is what we’ll do together.
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The last point I wanted to make as to why Shakespeare? Why Shakespeare? Well, Shakespeare is deeply moral and teaches moral lessons that we want our children to absorb as they grow up. They just are. We learn things like courage and inner joy and confidence from Helena and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who’s more confident than Bottom who wants to play every role in the play they’re putting on in Midsummer Night’s Dream? You learn about the importance of faithfulness and faithfulness to your family members and to the good values that encourages in Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is all, we’ll get back to Twelfth Night if we have time later, is all about the love of a brother and a sister, twin brother and sister and that’s what Twelfth Night does is in their fierce love for each other teaches us really important values.
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How do you make good decisions? How do you not get misled by people who make bad decisions and want to influence you? That’s what Macbeth is all about. Oh, Lady Macbeth just pulls him down the wrong road and he seems to be at least the beginning and essentially moral human beings who gets led astray. Now these plays are complex because we’re complex, because they’re talking about us, talking about us and that was what makes them good lessons for our kids.
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I brought up another book out. I was going to show you what I did with it? It’s called… Oh here it is. It is a wonderful book by Harold Bloom who taught Shakespeare at Yale and at Columbia for years. He just passed away this past year in his late 80s if not 90s. He was one of the great professors of English of all time and it’s called Shakespeare and The Invention of the Human.
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In many ways Shakespeare invented who we are. The literature before Shakespeare, certainly the play literature the dramatic literature was pretty awful. The comedies were things like Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Ralph Roister Doister. They were almost illiterate themselves. And Shakespeare out of some amazing genius of him, created characters who we started to imitate and became us.
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We became Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. A couple who war with each other and then in love with each other at the end. That’s every romantic comedy we’ve seen with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. That’s a wonderful book. He goes play by play about the invention of the human by Shakespeare and I opened it and pulled it off my shelf because I thought it’d be fun to show it to you guys and I looked in it I swear to you this is the truth is I found annotations by my daughter and they’re dated at one point before she went off to college. You can tell they’re by my daughter because they are in blue and they have little flowers around them.
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I spent years teaching my daughter something about Shakespeare and she took it to heart. Anyway, that’s sort of my why teach yourself Shakespeare because he’s so central to who we are.
Sarah (00:18:50):
Yeah. If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, okay, right, but when I hear… What was the quote that you said, Ken, that had forgeries in it?
Speaker 2 (00:18:57):
These are the forgeries of jealousy.
Sarah (00:18:59):
Okay, so if you were to say, okay, right, but if I read that with my kids, I don’t know what it means. We’re going to get to that in a little bit. So hang with us, because you don’t need to know what it means yet. We’ll get there. We’ll get to how do you uncover this if you’re just brand new to it because just like Ken is saying, it can be really overwhelming for us to look at it and think how am I supposed to teach this when I don’t know what it means? Ken said, it feels like it’s in a different language. And it kind of is, because that’s not the language we use now.
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We don’t use that kind of Elizabethan language. But let’s back up. Before we get there, let’s think about how do we start? What’s your recommendation for those of us who want to start teaching Shakespeare with our kids?
Speaker 2 (00:19:39):
Great. And you’ll take it very slowly. This sounds self serving. Believe me, nobody made any money from selling Shakespeare books. I promise you. If you look at the book, what does this book? Well the book says-
Sarah (00:19:58):
This one. You’re talking about this one, right?
Speaker 2 (00:20:01):
[crosstalk 00:20:01] Because I did this with my children. My daughter came home just from school one day when she… I talk about this in the book. When she was in first grade and she said that line from Shakespeare, “I know a bank, where the wild thyme blows.” And I went, “Oh my gosh, where did she learn a line of Shakespeare?” She’s in first grade. She’s six years old. Their teacher taught it to them. And I said, oh well, maybe this is a way to help really open up her life and spend fun time together. And that’s where this came from.
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And so, what I figured out was that the way to introduce Shakespeare for the first time was to start with simple passages of two lines or four lines and have the kids memorize them. Memorization, it is a great almost lost art. 100 years ago, everybody in school was memorizing poems. We don’t do that much anymore. And this
Sarah (00:20:56):
Although, I think, if I can interrupt you just for a second, actually, any of us that have kids, especially younger kids know that our kids are memorizing things all the time. Songs, jingles, commercials. They memorize. I think this ends up being a matter of just giving them something better to memorize, because they show naturally really do memorize and love to repeat and chant and sing little ditties. That’s what I love about this is it’s giving them something really wonderful to memorize too.
Speaker 2 (00:21:26):
Yes, yes. For example, I start with passages that are rhymed because kids like nursery rhymes and when they’re six and you can start them at 10, you can start them at 12, you can start them at 15. But everybody… It’s easier to memorize things that have rhythm that rhyme at the end. “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows.” Or the second passage, the one we’ll sort of talk about a little later, “Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand.”
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So you find that the kids really pick this up very quickly. Spend a half an hour snuggled up together with your six-year-old and you repeat it together and explain where it came from and what the characters are because if you start with as you should, with Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because it’s funny and they got wonderful characters and a fun plot and it’s set in a fairy land with the king and queen of the fairies as well as in the real world. They just take to it immediately. My kids and everybody I’ve worked with on this book just loved getting involved in it. It’s a whole new world and it’s happy.
Sarah (00:22:49):
It’s funny. Oh, funny. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:22:51):
And very funny.
Sarah (00:22:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:22:52):
You just memorize some things together. I’ll tell you, the other thing is it’s really isn’t good, important lesson for this question which is stay two pages ahead of your kids.
Sarah (00:23:06):
So good. Yes.
Speaker 2 (00:23:08):
In other words, it’s not complicated. You don’t go, “Oh, my God, I got to read this whole book and it’s got 25 or however many passages I put in.” Is read the first chapter, which is three pages. Every chapter is very short. You go, “Okay, I’ve read that.” So when I sit down with my child and we’ve got the book open together, they don’t even have to learn to read yet, at all, is you’ve got that. And if you’re two or three pages ahead of your kids, this whole book is about how to teach your kids.
Sarah (00:23:39):
Yeah. If I can give a little… I’ll kind of hold it up here. But so one of the things I love about this book is how open and go it is which any homeschooling parent who has a million things to do, dinner on the table, laundry, tennis and work and all the things we have to get done in the day needs things that are just open and go.
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I want to have a good, rich experience with my kids, but I don’t have a whole bunch of time. So this, what I love about this is not only does Ken pick the passages. So the first one that he just began was, “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,” but he also explains what’s happening in the play. And so you could just like he says, just stay a couple pages ahead of your kids in here.
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You’ll know what’s happening in the play, you’ll be able to show them pictures and tell them about the play. Then memorize this passage. I bet if you give this a whirl, you’ll be surprised at how quickly your kids memorize this stuff. It’s really fun. My kids are usually better at memorizing this than I am. They get it. They master it before I do. All of my kids, but can I take a second Ken to show… Maybe I can show them your website and I can show them a few of the tools that you have that go with the book on your website?
Speaker 2 (00:24:50):
Oh yeah. Good. That’d be great.
Sarah (00:24:51):
Okay, great. If you go to kenludwig.com which is Ken’s main site and there’s all kinds of good stuff here. This is of course, the Shakespeare Made Fun area and based on the book, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare and if we click learn more here, we’re going to be taken down here to a place where there are a bunch of resources that will help you use the book.
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So we were just talking about the first passage and the second passage is a jaunty bit that I would love to play too. But here’s what I’m going to show you that you can use here on the website. In the book, you’re going to find the passages and you’re going to see… I don’t know if you can see this. It’s probably hard to see because I’m a little square up there.
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The way that it’s outlined here, is I’ll pull it up on the screen so you can see it. He’s got the passages here in these downloadables and it’s the way that this is, “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxslips and the nodding violet grows,” the way that it’s laid out on the page makes it very simple for your kids to follow along and memorize it.
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And so if you were going to do passage one and you wanted to come to the website and download this PDF, where it’s printed out for you and you can print it out, you give it to your readers, honestly, your non-readers might even be able to kind of keep pace with it because it’s so rhythmic. “I know a bank…” And they can kind of follow along with your finger. Then you can use these and you can hang them up on the fridge or you can put them into notebooks or you can just set them out and look at them yourself.
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These printables are super helpful. But not only that, I also want to show you on the websites. Quotation sheets are down here. These all correlate with the ones in the book. But down here where there’s audio clips, we can click listen now and you get to hear these Shakespearean passages performed by amazing actors like Sir Derek Jakobi, Richard Clippard, Francis Barber. Can I play a couple of these, Ken?
Speaker 2 (00:26:49):
Let me tell you a funny anecdote about this before you start playing which is the name dropping one on one. Derek Jacobi. Sir Derek Jacobi’s a great, great, very, very close friend as is his partner, Richard Clifford. As I was writing this book, I picked up the phone one day on a whim and I called him up and I said, “Hey, guys. Would you record these passages for me? I’m going to pick 25 passages.” I was thinking oh, this is going to be easy. They’ll put their iPhones down and so then they’ll read the passages.
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So later, I found out that Random House said to them, “No, that audio is not good enough. You have to go into a studio in London, spend the day recording them.” So I ended up owing them big time. And then on the way to the studio, they said, “There are some of these passages that are for women. We thought we wanted to check this with you. We asked a friend of ours, Francis Barber, if she would do the women’s passages.” Well Francis Barber has started through all Royal Shakespeare Company’s Cleopatra and Cleopatra. She’s one of the greatest actresses that’s ever lived. And so these three actors are great. All right. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.
Sarah (00:27:54):
Okay, so just so you can hear how wonderful this is. And what I really want you to just know is the passages as you’re going through them, it’s just a few lines to memorize. But listen, you can even just put this on for your kids as you’re memorizing it and it really takes the bar down as far as you needing to know how should I recite this? This is Shakespeare. Well.
Speaker 3 (00:28:11):
Passage one, From A Midsummer Night’s Dream, spoken by Oberon.
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I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight; and there the snake throws her enamell’d skin, weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in. And with the juice of this, I’ll streak her eyes and make her full of hateful fantasies.
Speaker 4 (00:28:58):
Passage two, From a Midsummer Night’s Dream spoken by Robin Goodfellow.
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Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand and the youth, mistook by me pleading for a lovers fee. Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Sarah (00:29:20):
It’s so good. Okay. Back, I’m going to show you again. So if you go to kenludwig.com and you click learn more under the Shakespeare Made Fun area, that’s where you’re going to find. You’ll find the passages you can print out, you’ll find the audio clips, good stuff. And of course, in the book itself, then there is the explanation of what’s happening.
(00:29:41):
What each of those lines means because it’s easier to memorize when you know what it means. And that’s the piece that you were talking about earlier, Ken, about how reading Shakespeare makes us slow down and read well because otherwise we don’t know what’s going on if we don’t stop and take a second to figure out what the heck it means.
Speaker 2 (00:29:57):
That is the other crucial piece. Just as important as memorization is even if you’re just reading it to the kids, and you weren’t memorizing, though you should memorize is understand every word yourself and therefore convey it to the kids because these are simple. These are English words. Some of them we haven’t used in a few 100 years, most of them 90% we have. Some of them have slightly different meanings than they used to have. You need to know precisely what you’re saying word by word.
(00:30:30):
We’ll talk about it if we get to learning together captain of our fairy band. But a good example is in Romeo and Juliet, we’re used to seeing Juliet on her balcony and saying, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo.” It sounds like she’s saying, “Is wherefore? Where are you?” She’s on a balcony. It’s dark. “Where’s Romeo? Where are you?” She’s not saying that. Wherefore didn’t mean that in Elizabethan times. It meant, why are you Romeo?
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Romeo is a member of one family clan called the Montagues. Juliet is a Capulet, another family and those two families are feuding. She’s saying, “Oh, why do you have to be Romeo? I’ve already fallen in love with you. Why can’t you have a different name?” Because she then says, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” She doesn’t want him to have that name. So she says “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Why do you have to be Romeo?” And understanding every word makes this come alive.
Sarah (00:31:41):
It’s so good. Actually, as you’re saying that, I’m thinking, okay, so I don’t know if any of you watching this went, “I would teach that wrong. I don’t know that.” Maybe we could skip ahead just for a second so we can talk about that. Talk about what happened. We don’t have the prior knowledge. We don’t understand if we’re doing Shakespeare and our kids say, “What does that mean?” Or we don’t actually know what it means, how do we proceed? What’s the best way to go forward with that?
Speaker 2 (00:32:11):
If there are passages that I talk about in the book, I’ll have gone minutely through every word and everything you need to know. But then hopefully, you’re going to take off and start reading say the whole play. And here’s my best advice and I brought a couple of books with me. Everybody goes, “Oh, what should I buy? How am I going to read the Shakespeare play?” The best addition to use in the whole world is the Folger Shakespeare Library editions. They’re very inexpensive. They’re paperbacks. They’re really inexpensive.
Sarah (00:32:42):
They’re like five bucks.
Speaker 2 (00:32:44):
Five bucks. The reason they’re so terrific is because the editors, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine came up with an idea when they were doing which is that, as they have, this as Hamlet, as they wrote the text on one side, they would put on the other side those notes that explain words that sometimes you’d find in footnotes, tiny footnotes at the bottom of page or at the back of a book but they’re right there. They’re right opposite the text. It was genius. What a wonder… No one else had ever done it before and no one else that I know of does it now except them.
(00:33:31):
Now there’s wonderful editions. If you want to get into a lot more scholarly apparatus, you use the Arden Shakespeares. The ones that the Royal Shakespeare Company used, I think are the Penguin Shakespeares, which have nothing on the page, but the word. But if you’re somewhat new to Shakespeare, and you go… If I want to read something to them or even the passages that I talk about, just look at it there and Barbara and Paul explain exactly what you need to know.
Sarah (00:34:02):
But here’s just an example this is from… So I got all these folders, because I talked to Ken and he told me they were the best version. So that’s what I always buy now. And so this is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And again, this is the play on this side and these are just the notes on this side and they even tell you which line. So this right here is an ounce. So in the line 36, I can see that the line says, “Be it ounce or cat or bear…” Am I saying that right? Ken, do you know?
Speaker 2 (00:34:31):
Yep. Yes you are.
Sarah (00:34:31):
That would be embarrassing. “Be it ounce or cat or bear, pard or boar with bristled hair. In thy eye that shall appear, when thou wakest, it is thy dear.” And I look over here and it means a lynx or pard means leopard. And exactly like Ken says, you don’t have to go flipping through or ask Siri what that means. You have it right here and it’s really helpful that it lines out line by line and when I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream with my three high schoolers who are now… One’s in college, and I’ve got two left at home. But a couple years ago, we read through Midsummer Night’s Dream together.
(00:35:06):
These are so inexpensive, I ended up buying one for each of the three of them and myself. And we sat and we read through it each taking lines, it was really fun. But then it was really helpful because we had those notes right next to the passages and that really is so helpful. So these, these are excellent. The other thing that I’ve done with them is we read Twelfth Night for our Read Aloud Revival mama book club year too, a couple of years back now. Yeah, it was a couple of years back. Ken, you came and chatted with us about it.
Speaker 2 (00:35:34):
Yeah. I did.
Sarah (00:35:35):
And what I think a lot of us ended up doing and these are moms who are reading it, so adults who are reading it right, is we would listen to the audio version. We’d get the audio narration of the play and then we would read the Folgers version listening to it. So we could hear the lines delivered because of course Shakespeare is… He wrote plays. They were meant to be performed, right? So we can hear them being delivered and then read them and have the notes really handy. It was so simple that we could just listen to this audiobook. It was so much richer of an experience than I had had before reading Shakespeare. So it can be very doable. And even if you feel like I don’t know what any of this means you, for a couple bucks, you can be equipped with what you need.
Speaker 2 (00:36:21):
If you ask, “How can I hear the play?” The answer is easy. Audible.com has every play in multiple versions. I sample and just pick one and for a couple of bucks, you can listen to it.
Sarah (00:36:33):
Yeah. What’s a good place to start with? You recommended you already said today Midsummer Night’s Dream. And that’s where you start in How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare. If somebody was here today and said, “I have all high schoolers,” or, “I have old little kids,” or, “I have a wide variety of ages running the gamut,” is that where you would start with?
Speaker 2 (00:36:59):
I’d start there with all of them without a question. It doesn’t matter what age. Traditionally in our school systems and some of them I know it’s built into the curriculum and for the teachers, they don’t have a choice is that they used to years ago pick Julius Caesar. And I can’t think of a worse play to begin learning Shakespeare than Julius Caesar.
(00:37:22):
All these old guys who are speaking about politics at great length with great subtlety, “Is it an interesting play?” Yes. “Is it an overrated play?” Yes, but whether it was overrated or not, it’s just too dense and too difficult. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t shout out to the kids. And the reason MidSummer is great is MidSummer has four plots. It opens with a ruler and a woman, they’re about to get married. Theseus and Hippolyta, she is Queen of the Amazons. That Wonder Woman is from the Amazons. That’s a nice hook. That didn’t exist a few years ago. [inaudible 00:38:04] As a great movie.
(00:38:06):
They’re about to get married. And they say, “At our wedding, let’s have somebody give us entertainment.” So the second story in the play is about a bunch of tradesmen who get together. Their cart rights and wheel rights and carpenters and they decide they’re going to put on a play called Pyramus and Thisbe and they rehearse the play during the course of this and they’re hilariously funny. They’re truly the funniest characters ever created in English literature.
(00:38:44):
They’re just the best, Bottom the weaver and flute, Francis Flute. They’re a wonderful group of people. Meanwhile, another plot’s going on have two lovers who want to get married. As it so often happens in literature, in general, to say nothing of plays and dramatic literature is a father says, “No, you may not marry my daughter.”
(00:39:11):
In this case, they flee to a forest and when they flee to that forest, that is a magic forest and it has magical creatures in it. Those magical creatures are ruled by the king and queen of the fairies who are Oberon and Titania and they are maybe my favorite characters ever created by Shakespeare. They speak with such amazing lyricism. That’s the story. There’s four stories going on and they’re all heart wrenching and romantic and fun and joyous. That’s the place to start no matter what age your child is.
Sarah (00:39:49):
Okay, maybe… Would it be fun for us to revisit this second passage from the Midsummer Night’s Dream, Captain of our Fairy Band? So we just heard it. I just played that audio bit. “Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand and the youth, mistook by me pleading for a lovers fee. Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
(00:40:12):
In the book, I want to point out to everybody that when we’re saying that, he’ll kind of walk you through step by step. I was just looking at this. For example, I’m going to read you a little bit from here. This is from page 31. He says, “As before, you should start by sitting next your child and looking at the quotation page together.” Now you know where you can grab those. And then he says, “No, the word fee in this passage means reward.” So he told you. You didn’t have to know. I didn’t know that before I read this the first time. So he told me that.
(00:40:41):
Okay, so then I can tell my kids fee means reward and a fond pageant is a foolish spectacle. Okay, so now we can read it. And then you keep going. And he even tells you, Helena is pronounced Helena. He’s really going to guide you through line by line helping you with the tempo, pace it out, the way it should be set up, heard recited, you can even go to the website then and listen to the audio bit like we just did and you’ll even find pictures from live productions of the plays in here, which is kind of fun. What am I missing? What else should I-
Speaker 2 (00:41:20):
I think that’s great. I think that’s a good one to talk about because it’s six lines. I think if I maybe had the book over again, maybe this would be the first one we look at. So you also need to ask yourself and it’s explained in the book, what’s happening? Who is saying this? Well, as Richard Clifford said in that recording, it’s recited by Robin Goodfellow. Well, who is Robin Goodfellow? He’s often known as Puck. And the reason is, is he is a puck. A puck was a mischievious otherworldly sprite, is a puck, P-U-C-K. That’s a word in the English language. This particular Puck happens to be named Robin Goodfellow. That’s his name.
(00:42:06):
The king of the ferries, Oberon, has his servant, his second in command. The one who does and runs all around for him and does his bidding and does his errands and that is Robin Goodfellow. Oberon though he’s been invisible, has seen these lovers run into the forest and he feels sorry for Helena. Because Helena, that’s not one of the original pair, that’s not the two who originally flee in the forest, Helena is in love with the guy who flees into the forest with Hermia. So she goes into the forest too. Oberon watches them and he feels sorry for Helena, who’s getting the raw end of the deal.
(00:42:53):
She’s not succeeding in her wishes. He’s going to come up with a magic flower that’s going to make everything right. But he’s told puck, “Let me know when they come back in the forest. I want to find Helena. I want to use my magic flower to make things right.” This magic flower is something that makes you fall in love with the first live creature that you see. So here’s what he said. So he says to puck, “Keep your eye out for them.” And here’s what happens when puck runs in and says to Oberon, “Captain of our fairy band,” meaning Oberon, “Helena is here at hand.”
(00:43:41):
“And the youth,” another boy, one of the boys, “miss took by me pleading for a lovers fee.” There’s another boy who’s after Elena but that’s not who she wants. And the youth… “Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand. And the youth miss took by me pleading for a lover’s fee.” He wants to be rewarded. “Shall we there fond pageant see?” Should we sit around, cross our arms and just watch them because it’s going to be really fun to see what they get up to?
(00:44:20):
“Now, we their fund pageant see. Lord, what fools these mortals be!” It six lines. It’s as well as Shakespeare ever wrote. It tells a nice simple story and it’s inconceivable to me that any kid wouldn’t enjoy memorizing those six lines. My kids used to run around the house, screaming the lawns. [inaudible 00:44:53]. That in itself is… That’s an example of how you just learn the passage, let it roll off your tongue. You’ll end up memorizing yourself too.
Sarah (00:45:03):
Yeah, one of the things I really love about this way of engaging with and introducing our kids to Shakespeare is that it means that we don’t actually need this full survey of Shakespeare. At least I know I do this when I’m thinking about teaching my kids, whether it’s do science or history or anything or introducing my kids to Shakespeare’s work.
(00:45:23):
I will think, okay, I need to know a whole bunch, we need to do like a survey. My kids needs to know all of Shakespeare’s plays. And what you’re inviting us here to do is not even to go in one play at a time, but to go in one passage at a time and just this one little scene and it gives us just enough that we probably want to hear the rest of the story.
(00:45:43):
Yeah, right behind me over here, I have The Young Reader’s Shakespeare, which is an illustrated version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But what I’ll find is, as we’re doing the passages, we start… I think your first… Is it the first four that are Midsummer Night’s Dream or is it more than that?
Speaker 2 (00:45:59):
The first big chunk of the book is Midsummer.
Sarah (00:46:02):
Yeah. So we are getting enough scenes and bits from it, that we really just want to know the whole story. And so there’s lots of great retellings. This is the Leon Garfield retellings of Shakespeare, but we can read the story with illustrations. And then or read the actual… This is the wrong one, but read the actual play. But anyway, you’re still inviting us in one passage at a time. So it’s just a bite, we’re just taking a bite. We don’t have to do this huge survey of Shakespeare, we don’t need to know which order we’re going to cover all the plays in.
(00:46:33):
Really actually when I think about this with my own kids, we didn’t do all the plays. My oldest is off at college now. But we did enough. It was in this way in this kind of joyful passage by passage, memorizing and playing with it and learning it, just slowing down to understand this short bit, that I think it’s… It was a really big gift to our kids as they get older. Audrey, my oldest, she is not intimidated by Shakespeare because she’s had these little passages and then watched them be explained line by line. So it doesn’t feel like Shakespeare is something I can’t understand.
(00:47:07):
She just knows that it’s delightful and you understand it slowly over time. But also, because we didn’t go, “We have no all of the Shakespeare plays. I want you to have all the Shakespeare before you leave home.” She has this fond memory of Shakespeare. It was a good moment for her. So then I think she’ll be more compelled then to revisit Shakespeare as she gets older, which of course is what we want our kids to do all through their whole lives long. So this feels to me like a very hospitable way to invite our kids into an appreciation of Shakespeare.
Speaker 2 (00:47:38):
That was so well said and I love what you said because it’s exactly right in the sense. Don’t think for a second. He wrote 36, they say 37 or 38, 36 plays that are in this big book called the First Folio. And if they go away to college knowing well one play or even knowing who the characters were in the story or maybe knowing one short passage like, “I know a bank,” or “Captain of our fairy band,” they’re just going to have an advantage when they go away over all the kids who don’t know what this stuff, Shakespeare is.
(00:48:23):
Let me also say that this sounds very elementary and forgive me if you go, “Oh my god, of course we know this already.” One of the goals of this book and my passion about it, is that we demystify Shakespeare. That opens up to who this is. And let me just say that when we say, oh, Shakespeare, you’re learning Shakespeare. First thing off to say is that what is… He was a man, his name was William Shakespeare. He was born in 1564 and you can use that and he died in 1616, use that to open up the lives of your kids in other ways too. 1564 is the year that Michelangelo died.
(00:49:08):
When my kids were growing up, I took paper and I typed all these pieces of paper together and I made a timeline of Western civilization. [inaudible 00:49:22]. I wish I could show it to you. It’s right in there in the kitchen. And it’s kind of interesting. You make connections. “Oh, that’s interesting.” And Cervantes who wrote Don Quixote. Well, he died the same year that Shakespeare did. And what’s going on elsewhere in the world? What kind of music is being played at the time? Well, that we know is Renaissance music that we now listen to with lutes and different instruments. But towards the end of that century, 1616, in the 1680s Bach is emerging so a sense of modern music is emerging.
(00:49:58):
It’s well to remember, here’s this guy. He just happened to be the greatest genius that ever lived. He grew up in a little town in England called Stratford upon Avon and loved the theater, probably because traveling theater companies came through the town and did theater in town. His father was the mayor. He was an alderman. But he was kind of like the mayor. And he got exposed… We probably think of him as sitting in the front row, because his dad was the alderman and he absorbed and said, “I want this life. I want a life in the theater.” So he goes to London and makes a life in the theater and writes these plays. It’s good to know that as you go in and teach that to the kids because it, again, demystifies everything.
Sarah (00:50:46):
Yeah. Yeah, and it feels like then if you’re demystifying that and then you’re offering a passage at a time, and it feels to me, I know a lot, in homeschooling and Read Aloud Revival, we’ll talk about spreading this feast for our kids. We’re not trying to just jam all this information and knowledge into our children, we really want to spread this feast for them so that they grow up to want to keep coming to the feast and learning. This feels like a way to spread the feast because it feels like just like here’s a bowl of marshmallows. In the form of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the form of, “Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand.”
(00:51:24):
And just taste that. What do you think? Do you want more? And then we come back to it over and over. And it’s like spreading this big feast. So it’s instead of saying like, “I have to get through the big…” I actually never got through all the passages in this book with my kids with my oldest one anyway, who’s gone off to college now. But again, it’s extending that invitation. It’s extending that opportunity to fall in love with Shakespeare and that’s what I think this book. It’s how to teach your children Shakespeare, how to teach yourself, Shakespeare like you mentioned and how to fall in love with Shakespeare one passage at a time. I love that.
Speaker 2 (00:51:56):
Great.
Sarah (00:51:58):
I think we have enough time I really wanted to know if you have a favorite passage, if you have a favorite passage of Shakespeare and why that might be.
Speaker 2 (00:52:06):
I do have a favorite passage. Do I have it here? Do I have Twelfth Night here? It’s in 12… I love Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is a play he wrote in the middle of his career about same time he wrote Hamlet. It’s a comedy. It’s I think the last of his comedies, he wrote three great comedies in the middle. After Midsummer, he wrote them for the trio of comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing.
(00:52:32):
Twelfth Night is sort of the most gnarliest and most interesting, but let me just… I’ll tell you what my favorite passage is by setting the scene. Viola is a young woman who at the beginning of the play is coming across the ocean and her ship hits a storm. She’s with her twin brother and she thinks he has been drowned. The first thing that happens is this shipwreck. Shakespeare, always gets her attention with a big event at the beginning of his plays.
(00:53:09):
Romeo and Juliet, Juliet starts with a street brawl all out of his place, open fast because he wants to get your attention. Here, it’s a shipwreck on the coast. And she crawls in the sand and the captain has been saved. And she says, “What country, friend, is this?” “It is Illyria, lady.” “My brother, he is in Elysium. Perchance he is not drown’d.” “It is perchance that you yourself were saved.”
(00:53:36):
She thinks her brother is probably drowned. Her heart is her brother in such a deep way amplified by the fact that they’re twins and they’re identical twins, which already we know we’re sort of in a fairy world because a brother and sister can never be truly identical. But they are. They are identical twins. That in throughout the play, one of the main stories in the play, it’s got two main stories. One of the main stories is her aching desire to find her brother again. In Act V, lo and behold, he is found.
(00:54:25):
And he has been running around the same town in Illyria wearing the same clothes and people have been mixing them up. That’s the comic essence of the play. And she figures out that he’s probably still alive because somebody sees her and calls her Sebastian and her name is Violet. Her brother’s name is Sebastian. She’s going, “Oh my god. Maybe he’s alive.” So that’s touching in itself, but at the end, they see each other and this is the passage that never, never fails to send me into tears when I see it on stage because it’s so moving that she sees her brother, but he’s wearing… She’s wearing men’s clothes as is he of course.
Sarah (00:55:08):
Do you want me to play the audio of it or do you want to read it?
Speaker 2 (00:55:11):
Do we have, “If nothing lets to make us happy both…”
Sarah (00:55:13):
Oh, maybe we don’t actually.
Speaker 2 (00:55:15):
I think I don’t because I refer to and talk about in the book, but it’s not one of the main passages because-
Sarah (00:55:21):
Got it. Okay.
Speaker 2 (00:55:22):
Too much setup. I’d rather have somebody else read it, believe me. She says, and then I’ll show you how the words, you have got to know the words. I’ll say it first. “If nothing lets to make us happy both, But this my masculine usurp’d attire, do not embrace me till each circumstance of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump that I am Viola.”
(00:55:51):
You say, “Gee! That sounds confusing.” It’s five lines. One, two, three, four, five. Five and a half. But she says, “If nothing lets,” allows, “if nothing allow…” Because he wants to rush to her and embrace her and Shakespeare being the master that he is, he’s holding this off, he’s pulling the string and making us wait and making everyone on stage wait for that final embrace between the two of them. The story is about love but this is not about two lovers. It’s about a love between a brother and a sister. This is act five scene one by the way. If anybody wants to know and line 261.
(00:56:27):
“If nothing lets to make us happy both, if nothing else allows us to make us happy both,” he goes, “But this my masculine usurp’d attire,” masculine means men, usurp’d means I took it from somewhere else. Attire means clothing. So if nothing stops us from running into each other’s arms, but my men’s clothing that I stole, my masculine usurp’d attire. What a wonderful way to say my men’s clothing, “My masculine usurp’d attire. Do not embrace me.” Don’t give me a hug yet. “Till each circumstance,” now this is going to mean how we’re going to explain this to each other in hours to come and days to come and years to come is, “Do not embrace me till each circumstance of place, time, fortune,” till we explain what happened? “Each circumstance of place, time, fortune do co-here and jump.”
(00:57:42):
Cohere means what? What does cohere mean? Brings together, comes together so we understand it. “Does cohere and jump.” Why does he use the word jump? I don’t know. It wasn’t a particular Elizabethan word. It was… He used that word to mean, because we’re going to jump up and down in excitement at being with each other, “Till each place, time and fortune do cohere and show, do cohere and prove, do cohere and jump that I am Violet.” What a passage. What language? What art? There is nothing in the in western civilization that compares but Michelangelo and Mozart, there are certain points where the human has gone to a genius other level and that’s what Shakespeare is.
Sarah (00:58:41):
I love listening to you talk about Shakespeare. I’d stay here a long time. I pulled up the passage in the book, which is page-
Speaker 2 (00:58:49):
Is it one of the passages?
Sarah (00:58:52):
It is. So I can play it.
Speaker 2 (00:58:54):
Oh play it. That would be better than me. Oh, good.
Sarah (00:58:56):
113 and I just… So in the passage here, it begins with Orsino, “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons! A natural perspective, that is and is not!” And Antonio replies, “An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin than these two creatures.” Which is Sebastian. And on the next page… First of all, you all know of course that Ken is going to… He does all that magical, wonderful stuff, where he explains to us what’s happening.
(00:59:24):
And there’s even a picture of an apple cleft in two giving us that visual image, that these two characters could not be told apart. “An apple cleft in two is not more twin than these two creatures, which is Sebastian.” So anyway, so wonderful.
Speaker 2 (00:59:38):
Oh, great. I forgot I had that part before. Oh, good, good, good.
Speaker 5 (00:59:41):
Passage 11 from Twelfth Night. Spoken by Orsino, Antonio, Olivia and Violent.
(00:59:51):
One face, on voice, one habit and two persons! A natural perspective that is and is not! An apple cleft in two is not more twin than these two creatures, which is Sebastian. Most wonderful.
Speaker 6 (01:00:11):
If nothing lets to make us happy both, but this my masculine usurp’d attire, do not embrace me till each circumstance of place, time, fortune do cohere and jump that I am Viola.
Sarah (01:00:28):
I’m going to start saying, “An apple cleft in two is not more twin than these two creatures,” when I’m looking at my identical twin boys who very much like to trick people and they can get away with it. Oh, man. All right. Well, I think we’re just about out of time. I did just open up the chat again in Zoom. If you wanted to say a final thank you to Ken.
(01:00:52):
I see Stacey on Facebook said, “I have to admit, I didn’t think I would resonate with this. But I totally want to learn more after viewing.” Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Great.
Sarah (01:01:00):
It’s so good. You guys, I cannot recommend this book highly enough, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare. Like I said, I’ve got obviously the hardcopy, which gets a lot of use at our house. But I also really like having the ebook edition because then you can pull it up on your Apple iBooks or your… I use the Kindle app on my phone, wherever you get your ebooks.
(01:01:21):
But it’s really handy because now that you’ve seen how you just take this one little passage and he’ll tell you about it and then you can just memorize this one little passage. Now you know what I mean when I say, if you’re sitting there waiting at the dentist’s office or sitting out in the parking lot waiting at the dentist’s office like you might be doing right now, wherever you happen to be, you can just do this little bite size bit and you might be surprised at how much your kids retain. There is a quote. I don’t remember where it’s from Ken. It’s, “I go, I go. Look how I go. Quicker than the arrow…”
Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Than the arrow from the Tartars bow.
Sarah (01:01:55):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
“I go, I go; see how I go. Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow. I go so fast that I could put a girdle round about the earth in 40 minutes.” That’s puck. That’s Robin Goodfellow.
Sarah (01:02:09):
That is Robin Goodfellow. Okay. Well, I remember for a while there, my older kids when they were younger, they would say that. I’d be like everybody get in the car, they’d all start reciting it and run out to the car. It was great. It becomes a part of your family vocabulary in a really fun, treasured way. It doesn’t hurt. But then your mother-in-law or your neighbor goes, “Oh, my goodness.” Is that Shakespeare? And you’re like, “Oh, yes. My children.”
Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Absolutely. Bragging rights are a big part of this.
Sarah (01:02:41):
Very important part. Oh, Ken, thank you so very much for taking the time to be with us today. I am feeling really… I’m about to get ready to launch back into Shakespeare with my own kids. We mentioned earlier that this is something that you can dip into with bite sized pieces. So I want to mention for all of you homeschooling parents out there, I don’t do Shakespeare with my kids all year round.
(01:03:03):
But we will come in and out of it. We’re right now we’re doing a bid on Emily Dickinson’s or memorizing some poems and reading some biographies and that kind of thing. In a couple of weeks, we’re going to wrap that up and we’re going to dive back into Shakespeare and my number one resource of course is how to teach your children Shakespeare but that’s my very first favorite go-to place and now you know why.
Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
I have got to say, you are about the most amazing person I’ve ever met. You are so adept and so eloquent that I just love being with you here. I do. I do. I really do.
Sarah (01:03:39):
Now it’s time for let the kids speak. I love this part of the podcast because kids share the books that they’ve been loving lately.
Blake (01:03:55):
Hi, my name is Blake. I’m 10. I live in Centennial and my favorite books are Keeper of the Lost Cities and Five Kingdoms. I like Keeper of Lost Cities because it’s unpredictable and I like Five Kingdoms because it’s exciting.
Sadie (01:04:12):
Hi, my name is Sadie. I’m nine years old. I live in Alexandria, Virginia. My favorite book series is Wolves of the Beyond by Kathryn Lasky. I like it because it involves wolves, adventures and mysteries, which I love. I also like the main character since he’s kind of smart and brave.
Allegra (01:04:29):
Hi, my name is Allegra. I’m nine years old and I live in Pennsylvania. My favorite series is the Secrets of Droon by Tony Abbott. I like it because it’s a fantasy and the kids have lots of adventures.
Connor (01:04:45):
Hello, my name is Connor. I am 10 years old. I live in Illinois and my favorite series are Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Wings of Fire because I like fantasy and adventure and all of these series have those.
Speaker 11 (01:05:02):
Hi, my name is [inaudible 01:05:04] and I’m eight and a half and I live in Illinois. My favorite book is Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo because I like how Opal and Winn-Dixie become friends.
Melanie (01:05:17):
My name is Melanie. I live in Omaha, Nebraska. I’m 4 years old. I like [inaudible 01:05:22] because everybody thinks they need more [inaudible 01:05:29]. Everybody thinks they need more of something.
Brenna (01:05:30):
My name is [Brenna 01:05:32]. I am seven years old. I am. I’m from Georgia. My favorite book right now, it’s also the series I’m reading it’s… The series is Tuesdays at the castle. I like it because it’s fantasy, magic.
Evie (01:05:51):
My name is Evie. I am five years old. I live in Georgia. My favorite book is Grandma’s Attic. I like it because it’s a story and someone’s telling a story in that story.
Connor (01:06:13):
Hello, my name is Connor. I am 12 years old. My favorite book is Keeper of Lost Cities. Because it is very… [inaudible 01:06:24] You can feel the emotions and it is fantastical and mystical.
Titus (01:06:34):
Hi, my name is Titus and I’m 10 years old and I live in North Carolina. My favorite book series is Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And I like it because you never know what’s going to happen next and there’s a lot of funny things that happen.
Speaker 17 (01:06:49):
My name is [inaudible 01:06:49]. I’m five and we live in North Carolina.
Sarah (01:06:53):
What’s your favorite book?
Speaker 17 (01:06:54):
I Was So Mad.
Sarah (01:06:59):
By Mercer Mayer. What do you like about the book?
Speaker 17 (01:07:05):
It has all these toads and this mouse, you can find this mouse and there’s another one that has spiders, you’re supposed to find spiders in it.
Eli (01:07:15):
Hi, my name is Eli. I’m 12 years old. I live in North Carolina. My favorite picture book is Go, Dog! Go. What I like about it is I like the picture at the end, that cool hat and I like that big party on the tree close to the end. My favorite listening book is a Sweep. It’s a really good book. I like it a lot because it’s about this charcoal comes to life, turns into a big block of charcoal and I it because it’s interesting and adventuring.
Sarah (01:08:00):
Eli, Sweep is one of my all time favorite books by Jonathan Auxier. So good, right? Highly recommended. Actually, Jonathan Auxier is one of our favorites around here. And he’s just about to come back to RAR Premium to teach a Storytelling Workshop, a writing workshop for ages eight to 16.
(01:08:22):
He’s done [A-WOW 01:08:23] writers on writing workshop for us before he’s about to come back and do another so if you’re a part of RAR Premium, check out the calendar to find out when that’s happening in February. And if you’re not a member of RAR Premium, you can find out more about it at rarpremium.com
(01:08:43):
Okay, that’s a wrap on today’s episode. I am so glad to have you with us. In two weeks, I’ll be back. I’m going to be talking next time about helping our developing readers fall in love with books. Listen, if you want first dibs on book lists and free resources and all the good stuff, we’re doing at Read Aloud Revival, the best way to do that is to get on our email list.
(01:09:06):
Head to readaloudrevival.com. And where the green button that says, “Let’s go.” Click that and you’ll pop in your email address and then we will know where to send you all those free resources, book recommendations, book lists and I’m mentioning that because in our next episode when we’re talking about helping our developing readers fall in love with books, we are going to have a pretty wonderful book list to go along with it. So I don’t want you to miss out on that. All right. I will be back in a couple of weeks. But in the meantime, you know what to do. Go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.
