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Fourth Grade Shakespeare

Mary McNulty
Francis Marion University

My plan for introducing Shakespeare to younger children evolved after I read Kenneth Koch's book, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch maintains that children can enjoy great adult poems, and he teaches great poetry to third through sixth graders by having the children write their poems utilizing the ideas and form they find in the adult poetry. Thus, after reading and discussing Blake's "The Tyger" with the class, he has them compose a poem in the same pattern--asking questions of an animate thing. After introducing William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just to Say," Koch had the children write short, simple poems apologizing for a certain action or behavior.

I looked over the body of Shakespeare's shorter poems for one that was simple and easily understood. I was not quite ready to tackle the complexities of the sonnet form with children just beginning to read adult poetry, so I settled upon one of the songs from Love's Labour's Lost, which is often printed separately and entitled "Winter":

When icicles hang by the wall,
and Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
and milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
"Tu-whit, tu-who!"

A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
and coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
and Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
"Tu-whit, tu-who!"

A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
(V, ii, 920-937)

It is not difficult to make arrangements for a seventy-five minute time block with a fourth grade teacher. In the middle of February, she was eager for the children to have an out-of-the-ordinary experience to brighten a long winter day. So I arrived at the classroom armed with a tape recording of a musical rendition of the song and a printed copy for each of the twenty-five students.

To make sure that their musical expectations were not far removed from that of the audiotape I brought, I first discussed with them medieval musical instruments, especially the recorder. With their copies of the poem in hand, the children listened quietly. When it was finished, they requested that it be played again; obviously they were enthralled by the song of the owl.

The next step was the most difficult: to get the children past the language barriers of the poem. Many of the words in the poem were not in their vocabulary, and some had changed in meaning over the past four hundred years. We looked at the poem line by line, as I attempted to create a multi-sensory picture of winter in sixteenth century England. They could understand Dick the shepherd blowing on his fingers to get them warm, Mirian's red nose that was a result of a winter head cold, and so many people coughing in church on Sunday that the preacher could not be heard. They were delightfully appalled by greasy Joan, the cook, who accumulated layers of grease upon herself and her clothes by cooking over an open fire. Bathing took place only in the warmer months.

Together, we also looked at the form of the poem: two stanzas, each followed by a refrain. they saw, too, how the details of the poem piled up through the repetition of the word "when." The children understood the poem and became comfortable with it. They were ready to write.

Pointing out again to the group that Shakespeare wrote about the winter as he experienced it, I asked them to write a poem about the winter they knew in twentieth century South Carolina. The lines did not have to rhyme, and a refrain was optional. What they were to do was create a word picture in their language of the details of winter.

The response was quick and enthusiastic. Within a few seconds, twenty-five heads were bent over their desks and twenty- five hands were writing. I walked among them to give encouragement and suggestions, but most were independently following their own muses. Results came quickly--much faster than I expected--and each wanted to share the finished product with me.

If an outsider read these poems without knowing their origin, he or she would assume that these children lived in Minnesota or the Dakotas, not South Carolina. A recent snowfall, however, had made the experience of ice and cold all too vivid for them, and so they wrote about frozen feet, frosty breath, and snowbanks past their knees.

Their poems left me no doubts as to the poetic capabilities of nine and ten-year-olds. Many adapted the "when" structure from Shakespeare, and some used refrains, but a number of the children developed images which were highly creative.

Jerry, for instance, used the refrain to show the seeming endlessness of winter:

The snow falling to the ground,
Your feet frozen to your legs,
Sitting by the warm fire,
The ice as slippery as grease,
Wrapped up in the blankets,
Waiting for the summer to come.

As winter
Goes on and on and on

You go outside and feel the cold,
The owls staring at everyone,
Moonlight shines on the frozen ground,
The dog shakes and shivers,
You think your teeth are going to fall out,
Waiting for the summer to come.

As winter
Goes on and on and on

Another child also picked up on the dreariness of the season with a refrain of "The winter never ends."

Using Shakespeare's "when" structure, Trina built a cumulative effect into her poem. She attempted not too successfully to rhyme her lines. The original image she created in the fifth line, however, redeemed the rhyming flaws:

When brisk winds are blowing
And fire places are glowing,
When hot chocolate is being made,
And children are all warmly tucked,
When Kleenex boxes are empty
And peoples' noses are red,
When sick people huddle in their beds,
And grandmas are sewing
And the wind in the trees makes a musical note,
When toes are numb,
When soup is boiling, and
While mother is making supper,
Everyone is having fun.

Tanya attempted a multi-sensory picture of winter in one of her stanzas:

The children build snowmen taller than they are.
The children throw snowballs at each other,
Going in, running out, going round and round,
Dancing to the music they pretend to hear.

Her last line made me especially aware of the imagination and resourcefulness of children. I could introduce them to Shakespeare, get them excited about writing winter poems, and suggest a poetic form to follow, but the imagery and expression were uniquely their own. Often, amid lines which are commonplace and cliche-ridden, I found a line or a phrase which shone. Kevin's two lines are among these:

When I wake up in our old house,
I feel the cold flirting around.

I left the fourth grade classroom that morning with a stack of poems, some good, others mediocre, yet all of them in some way wonderful. The children felt that they had made an acquaintance with William Shakespeare, and they shared something in common with him. The classroom teacher reported later that their favorite word was "doth," and they used it extensively on the playground to impress the children in the lower grades!

From this experience, I came to a number of important conclusions:

1. Shakespeare can be introduced to children in the elementary school.
2. Traditional poetry can help children understand form and introduce poetic topics.
3. Traditional poetry does not stifle children's creativity, but rather it can be a means of sparking and releasing their creative potential.