These Shakespeare Week activities from education officer Sally Gray will help pupils explore their own identities...
Do you wear your heart on your sleeve? Are you sometimes the green-eyed monster? Although Shakespeare wrote over 400 years ago, the creative language he used to describe the human spirit remains relevant today.
Shakespeare Week is an annual celebration of Shakespeare in primary schools, organised by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
These exciting emotional wellbeing activities will help your pupils to become Will’s Wellbeing Warriors as part of your Shakespeare Week celebrations this year.
What they’ll learn
- Mental wellbeing is as important as our physical health
- How to recognise and talk about emotions
- Self-belief is an important part of our mental wellbeing
- Develop understanding through hypothesising and exploring ideas
- Create a haiku poem
Starter activity
Shakespeare’s language can cast a light on the complexity of human emotions and is a wonderful way to explore and understand our own and other’s feelings.
Warm up with a couple of whole class games. Start with ‘Who are we?’: one child says their name then points to another child who stands up and says their name. They then point to another pupil until everyone is standing.
Follow with ‘What am I?’. Here, each child in turn says their name and uses a positive adjective to describe him or herself, then sits down: “I am Manveer and I am kind”, for example.
Sally Gray is education officer at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a former primary teacher. Register on the Shakespeare Week website to receive access to hundreds of free resources including assembly plans, videos, short versions of Shakespeare’s plays, poetry, storytelling, grammar, debate, art and much more. Follow @shakespeareweek on X for updates.
