After a school-wide, month-long study of the works of William Shakespeare, Conerstone Christian Academy recently hosted the 14th-Annual Shakespeare Festival.
The entire student body, from kindergarten through fifth grade, devoted the month of April to studying William Shakespeare in anticipation of participating in the long-held school tradition; younger grades listened to summaries of Shakespearean tales read aloud by teachers and memorized sonnets and dialogues, middle-grade students read prose abridgments of plays, while fifth and sixth graders ventured into the original texts.
Hands-on activities engaged students in the culture of Elizabethan era; its architecture, clothing, food, pastimes, and occupations, while timelines enabled students to relate incidents in the plays to real-life events from various historical epochs.Â
While students learned their lines and rehearsed their performances, a determined team of parents and older siblings labored behind the scenes, creating and fitting costumes, building and decorating sets, selling tickets, designing the event’s playbill, and directing the staging.
