In this abridged version of ‘Pygmalion’, the basic story line has been kept and no important events left out. Everything, including the stage directions, has been downsized to a quarter of the play’s original length. In the script that remains, most of Shaw’s words remain the same: changes have only been made when archaic or overly complex writing may interrupt the smooth flow. Prior to each act is a concise summary of events and following each act is a set of review questions. A character guide also features. This unit will ideally suit the teacher seeking a fairly equal mix of English and drama at the upper end of KS3 or KS4. There are further opportunities for written work in the Pygmalion Workbook (included) which gives background notes about the play and has activities in connection with each of the five acts. George Bernard Shaw believed everyone should have the same opportunities in life despite their colour, class, age, or the way they speak. 'Pygmalion' is the story of the flower girl from the gutter, Eliza Doolittle, who proves she can become as beautiful and well-spoken as a Duchess within six months with the help of speech expert Professor Henry Higgins who makes a bet with his friend Pickering. Higgins’ mother and Mrs. Pearce see the potential problems of this project. They are concerned about what will happen to Eliza when six months are over. She will be different. Will she be able to go back to her life on the street? Higgins and Pickering, despite being middle-aged, are immature and don’t wish to think ahead. Eliza proves to be an excellent mimic, like a parrot! When the six months are up, Higgins wins his bet but Eliza is unhappy about the idea of being thrown away. The play’s title is taken from a Greek myth. Pygmalion was a king who was also a sculptor of beautiful statues. He didn’t like the women in his city and he asked the goddess of love Aphrodite to bring his favourite statue to life. Pygmalion then married her. The play is similar to the myth in the following ways: Higgins is like Pygmalion in that he creates a beautiful Eliza. (She is described as quite ugly and rude at the start of the play when she’s a flower girl, in addition to making awful noises.) When his work with Eliza is finished, he realizes he is very fond of her and doesn’t want her to go after all. A change, therefore, takes place in Higgins too: he goes from cold-hearted to warm-hearted.

The purpose of this project is to introduce Shakespeare in performance to students of all abilities aged 11-14 years. Working with an abridged version of ‘The Tempest’ and structured activities, students will get an idea of what is required to put on a production, from understanding the issues in the play to designing costumes. The abridged version has been adapted to be more beneficial to a school cast by increasing the number of parts for girls (King Alonso has become Queen Alonsa, and the scheming brother Sebastian has become a scheming sister, Sebastiana), and the option of splitting Ariel, a main character, into six parts, giving students the chance to share this fantastic character, and opening up further opportunities for effective movement on stage as detailed in the Ariel activities here. In the first part of the project, the students explore the main issues of the play through lively drama activities, developing their skills as performers. Movement is a key area of the project and students will learn about body language and physical expression. A speech and main phrases are studied in order to develop voice skills. Drama vocabulary is expanded, getting students ready for GCSE. In the second part of the project, the students will design their production with the aid of photocopiable worksheets. Important character details and quotations are provided to assist students in the planning of the costume, hair and make-up for each character. Problem solving activities are tackled in designing the bewitched banquet. A list of sound effects and music is provided and students are encouraged to create their own musical instruments.

In this resource, extracts from eight plays have been carefully selected to introduce to students new to Shakespeare. The activities that accompany the extracts are designed to make Shakespeare accessible even to the unenthusiastic student, and gradually become more challenging as the unit progresses. Activities include improvisation, making a flip book, costume design, finding out about the Elizabethan homeless and tableaux with silent movie style captions. Students are gradually eased into a lively step-by-step understanding of Shakespeare. The approach to each extract is different to give a sense of variety. Literary terms such as alliteration, rhyme sequence and pun are explained, and students find and highlight examples in the text. By thinking about the tone of voice that is best suited to certain phrases, and which words and phrases to emphasize, the text is vocalized and brought to life. Themes in the text are given a modern-day context through improvisation, making the issues relevant to the students. Terms such as a play within a play, soliloquy, dumb show and prologue are applied to the extracts with explanations. Students will gain an understanding of the nature of Comedy and Tragedy. In the prologue from Henry V students will gain an insight into Shakespeare’s ideas about the nature of theatre. The texts are presented almost entirely in their original versions. Following each extract, the less familiar words are listed with their meanings.

The Alchemist, by Shakespeare’s close friend Ben Jonson, is a lively choice for a school production. It runs for approximately 90 minutes and has parts for 20 students of varying abilities aged from 14 to 18. Accompanying the abridged version is a pack of 25 photocopiable activities. The Alchemist takes place in a manageable setting of a sparsely furnished house in London, early 1600s. It is a madcap comedy led by three con artists who step into one disguise after another. Face, Dol and Subtle trick a variety of victims into believing that they can turn metal into gold, produce the philosopher’s stone and invent a fairy queen aunt who promises to bring luck to a young gambler. Throughout the drama activities, students will develop performing skills and an understanding of this exciting period of drama. There are structured tasks on what is required to put on a play, from designing costumes using quotations from the play as stimuli to planning a functional and lively set. The exercise ‘What is Farce?’ highlights the essential ingredients of this genre and gives students the opportunity to create their own mini farces. Ben Jonson’s frantic and exhilarating style of drama is also explored through practical tasks. The exercises include relevant snippets of information about alchemy and the role of women in the 1600s. Other than occasional internet research, no additional resources are required for the exercises. Following the abridged version of the play is a glossary to enable students to make the most of the play and its era.

"She Stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith has, for over a century, been the most widely read and performed 18th century play in English literature. The version provided here has been cut so as to be approximately one-third shorter than the original. The language has also been slightly simplified to make the play more accessible to both native speakers and ESL learners, while still retaining the feel of 18th century speech. At the start of each scene is a summary and at the end of each act is a set of review questions. "She Stoops to Conquer" premiered in London in 1773, just a year before Goldsmith, a gambler and a drinker, died aged 46. It is very likely that in the play's most famous and best loved character, Tony Lumpkin, the wayward and awkward young squire, who may be too fond of a good drink and a good joke, but who definitely has a good heart, Goldsmith was immortalizing the best of his younger self. In 1772, while he was working on "She Stoops to Conquer", Goldsmith published "An Essay on the Theatre", in which he argued that comic drama in England in his day had become so focused on being polite that it had ceased to be funny. In his play he wanted to bring back the raw, laugh-out-loud, brand of humour that he admired in the comic plays and characters of Shakespeare, as well as of the great Restoration comedies written roughly a hundred years before-- and that was exactly what he did. In addition to making his audience laugh, Goldsmith also has a serious purpose in "She Stoops to Conquer". He was Irish and middle class and his rough manner had made his socially elite university, Trinity College Dublin, reject him. However, outside the front gate of this university, a larger than life, bronze statue of him now stands. In his play, he makes fun of a society in which class and wealth determine how people relate to one another. The main pair of lovers in his play, Marlow and Kate, has to invent other characters for themselves in order to break out of the restrictive manners of their class and relate to each other intimately as man and woman. By making fun of class and manners in "She Stoops to Conquer", Goldsmith is the direct forerunner of the next great comic playwrights to revitalize the English stage more than one-hundred and twenty years later, his fellow Irishmen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

This unit of work runs for approx 8 hours of lessons and is aimed at 9-11 year-olds. Using creature descriptions from Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass as springboards, students create drawings, paintings and models from their interpretation of the text, culminating in a pop-up book style artwork which helps develop Design Technology skills. Included are exemplars from my class.

I had an English as an additional language group who were assigned to study some poems which was a challenge. I couldn’t find anything really easy online so here are some basic question sheets to aid understanding. Nothing fancy but may help to make accessible. Poems are Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, Love and Friendship by Emily Bronte, The Sea by James Reeves, Sonnet 18 and basic guide to sonnets, Daffodils by William Wordsworth, A Time to Talk by Robert Frost