Community-building activities allow for risk-taking, creativity, and active participation. These exercises can encourage your student to work as an “ensemble”—being open to each other’s ideas and choices. And if you’re teaching virtually, these activities will help engage some of your “camera-shy” students.
Reading a Performance: Romeo and Juliet
How do actors’ and directors’ choices influence our understanding of Mercutio? Track Mercutio’s characterization in three different Chicago Shakespeare productions of Romeo and Juliet.
Reading a Performance: Macbeth
How do YOU imagine the Weird Sisters? Close read clips from three different productions of Macbeth produced by Chicago Shakespeare Theater!
At the center of Chicago Shakespeare’s work with actors—and teachers and students—is the process called “text work.” Explore some of these clues in Romeo and Juliet with Associate Professor of Theatre Kevin Long.
This activity will introduce students to the story of Romeo and Juliet while speaking Shakespeare’s words for the first time and physically activating key lines.
Text Summarizing: Parts of a Whole
We love this activity as a way to actively and imaginatively summarize or analyze a text you’ve read—or as a quick community builder to foster collaboration and trust in a classroom.
Text Summarizing: Pearls on a String
This low-stakes improv game is one of the most engaging ways we know to summarize material—and to work together as a group doing it. You can recap faithfully—or create your own twist on a familiar story!