Shakespeare not hard yet for school kids

Star-crossed, the King and Queen of the Fairies, a donkey, magic spells and a "knavish sprite" were all on the curriculum at a Thousand Oaks elementary school this week as students were introduced to the world of William Shakespeare.

Children at the K-6 Glenwood School participated in workshops led by professional actors before being treated to a condensed performance of Shakespeare's comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Excited second-graders coming out of one workshop couldn't wait to share what they had learned. "He wrote poems, and he wrote plays," Megan Hanson said.

Blake White, 7, said, "I think it's very cool, and I think we should learn more Shakespeare so we can understand the language."

The school outreach program was offered by the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company, a professional nonprofit theater organization based in Thousand Oaks. Its 10th annual Shakespeare Educational Tour, which began last month and concludes next week, is stopping at 17 elementary and middle schools in Fillmore, Moorpark, Thousand Oaks, Ventura and Westlake.

Chris-Gerard Heyward, 23, of Los Angeles, one of six professional actors hired for the tour this year, said it's wonderful to see how children react to the language of the Bard. "You can definitely see when something clicks," he said. "You can see the lights go on when they get it, and then they get excited, and they want to be a part of the show."

"It's pretty cool for me," said fifth-grader Sam Carow, 11, who volunteered to play the part of the "knavish sprite" Puck at one of the workshops Wednesday at Glenwood. "I never played anything like it. It was a little hard to remember the words but not that much."

Students were taught how to bow and curtsy and bid each other "Good morrow" as they learned about customs and costumes from 16th-century England.

They were astonished to learn Shakespeare invented words that are commonly used today, such as "eyeball," which first appeared as a word in "The Tempest"; "invisible," first introduced in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; and "gnarly," which comes from "The Winter's Tale."

"I learned you can make up your own words, and you don't have to use words that people already made up," said Savanah Lopez, 11. "You can just be yourself and you can say your own things and stuff without following other people."

Shakespeare might prove daunting to most adults, but Los Angeles-based actress Vanessa Smith, 31, said younger children respond well to the old-fashioned way of speaking.

"It's the right age for them because they're still open to language, and nobody's told them yet that Shakespeare's hard," she said. "They're still learning English, so they are still open to new words and ideas."

When the program began a decade ago, organizers worked with the Conejo Valley Unified School District to develop an educational unit that introduced third-, fourth- and fifth-graders to three Shakespeare plays, "A Midsummer's Night Dream," "The Tempest" and "Twelfth Night."

"The teachers love this as a learning medium to teach language lessons, and they've even embedded math and science in it and all sorts of things, and it's used to provide a lot of exciting learning activities for the kids," said Michael McCambridge, a faculty member at the School of Education at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

McCambridge has a background in theater education and is volunteering his time to help Kingsmen Artistic Director Michael Arndt, a CLU theater arts professor, with the educational outreach program.

For the first time, the tour this year expanded beyond the Conejo Valley to include schools in Fillmore, Moorpark and Ventura.

McCambridge said the goal is to expand the program to all Ventura County school districts and to include high schools.

"Everything is in Shakespeare; that's the best thing about it," said McCambridge. "Wonderful storytelling, action, comedy, laughing; all of that is there, so why not take this classic literature and tell it? The kids get it. They really do."

"Hopefully, their first memory of Shakespeare is that it's fun," said Brett Elliott, 37, an actor and director who has helped develop the workshops and direct performances. "It's really valuable to be able to expose them to this wonderful art form before they get misconceptions about it."

Vanessa Smith, 31, has been involved in the school tour for 10 years and said the actors receive as much as they give.

"It's a good way to be excited again about the language and to remember that these are words that people have never heard before," she said. "It sort of breaks all the myths that you can't perform Shakespeare for children in elementary school."

--- Published in the Ventura County Star on April 18, 2008