This theme provided an excellent opportunity for children to not only learn about the history of drama but also to create their own playscripts inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. They thoroughly enjoyed learning about how to include stage directions, dialogues, setting descriptions and Shakespearean language in their playscripts.

Story Whoosh 

To kickstart our Shakespeare topic, we came together as a year group to create a story whoosh of Romeo and Juliet. This was the first time we had explored the play and so it was the first time at we were learning about the characters involved and what happens to them. In a story whoosh, the teacher reads out the story (like a narrator) and the children will come up and act out certain parts. When the teacher shouts WHOOSH all of the children acting will sit down and new children will come up. This way, every gets a chance to be a part of the story!

Drama Workshop

We were fortunate enough to have a visitor from the theatre company - Big Foot. We created tableu's (freeze frames) showing the main scenes in Romeo and Juliet. This helped us to understand the plot of the playa nd the characters emotions, feelings and actions. 

Salvador Dali art

We looked at artwork by the famous Salvador Dali, this inspired us to create our own pieces of artwork, including the characters of Romeo and Juliet.

Alternative endings

During our Writing lessons, we wrote alternative endings for Romeo and Juliet, thinking about what could've happened, rather than what did happen. We spent 2 weeks analyzing the play and, brainstorming, planning, writing and acting out our ideas until we finally had our written piece. Watch some videos below of our alternative endings!