In my decade as an English teacher, I’ve taught Romeo and Juliet. I currently teach Julius Caesar. But I love, love, love my Hamlet lesson plans. And here’s why.
Course Overview
One of the three preps I have as a high school English teacher includes British Literature. It’s a semester-long course, and it’s reserved primarily for seniors.
Previously, it was a required course. In fact, it was the required English course of all seniors. But in recent years, I’ve found out, it’s been demoted (in a sense) to a senior elective instead.
I don’t mean to suggest I have criticism, but I will freely say organizing Hamlet lesson plans can be more of a challenge when you’re dealing with a limited time frame.
Here’s a look at what I did with the sixteen students I had this year.
Hamlet Lesson Plans Overview
To best situate you right off the bat, I should share that when planning a unit, I like to work backwards. What I mean to say is I start with the assessment in mind. Then, when building something like my Hamlet lesson plans, I ask myself: how can I best design activities to help my students achieve success on this assessment?
For Hamlet this year, I knew students would write an analytical essay. About what? I wasn’t entirely sure from the start. But I knew that the essay would be a foundational assessment based largely on analysis of the text.
To set my students up to thrive on this assessment, I wanted to close read – often – with a close examination of how various motifs could better help us understand the larger themes of the work. To do that, we set our sights on reading as many of the major scenes in their entirety as time would allow.
Outside of this intense reading of the text, I also wanted to sprinkle in pops of memorable activities in my Hamlet lesson plans. These often came in the form of an activator or warm-up but sometimes would serve as the more time-consuming activity of the day.
To keep pace with the rest of my curriculum, I set aside about three weeks to cover all my Hamlet lesson plans. We have block scheduling in my district. On average, I see my classes twice a week and occasionally three times. Roughly, we would cover one act a day. It was a quick pace but we were still able to cover the text in a meaningful way thanks to memorable activities.
Some of My Favorite hamlet lesson plan activities
Though it’s time-consuming and labor-intensive to design an entire unit, it’s a process I love. And I love to return to it each year. Already the wheels are turning in my brain for what I can do for my Hamlet lesson plans next year. But for now, here are some of my favorites from this past year.
Which Hamlet Character Are You?
By Act Two, my students had a general understanding of the play and its characters. This is when I seized the opportunity for a quick personality survey. The goal? To determine which Hamlet character you were.
I factored this activity into my Hamlet lesson plans as an activator. The warm-up was meant to be done independently and quickly. For both of those criteria, it worked very well.
It also got students talking, which was another goal of mine. It was funny to see students first peek at and then talk about their classmates’ results. I had a lot of students interact who otherwise wouldn’t simply because they both “got” the same character. Humorously, a few guys ended up being female characters (and vise versa), which was a highly talked-about scenario.
Is the survey perfect? Of course not. Would I use it with younger students? Also, probably no. But with my seniors as a quick warm-up, it was the perfect addition. If you’re interested in using the survey in your classroom, here’s the link.
Criminal Insanity Defense
Shortly into the play, I realized what I wanted our essay to be about: Hamlet’s sanity (or lack thereof). So as I put together my Hamlet lesson plans, I kept in mind what would help my students in the long run.
Cue the class presentation on criminal insanity.
Though the subject changes, this is an activity I absolutely love to recycle in my classroom. I create a Google Slides presentation and share the editor’s link with all students. I set the parameters and ground rules (“No touching someone else’s slide without permission”) and watch them create.
In the past I’ve used this template for a digital debate. I’ll often split the slide in half and assign each partner one perspective of the argument. It’s neat for them to share the space and respond to their opponent’s commentary in real time.
But for my Hamlet lesson plans, I instead assigned each student a different defendant who plead insanity in a criminal case. I gave students an allotted amount of time and some guidance as far as helpful websites. And I waited for them to do their thing.
When the time was up, each student had put together a comprehensive and interesting slide in our class presentation. I offered everyone the choice to present their findings from their seat (very informal) or I would present for them. I’d say it was about a 70/30 split with most students opting to read their own work.
It was neat to see what students could create in a relatively short amount of time. And it was even cooler to see the connections they made to Hamlet. That was one of my requirements – find a parallel to Hamlet thus far. (We were still relatively early in the play at that point.) On several occasions, students shared insight I had never even considered.
Table Reads in my Hamlet Lesson Plans
And perhaps the lowest-prep but most impactful inclusion in my Hamlet lesson plans was the table reads. By “table read,” I mean a patient reading of major scenes in the play with students volunteering to read parts without leaving the comfort of their desks.
Again, this is something I’ve done prior to building my Hamlet lesson plans. I find it to be very valuable and low-stress for students. Ahead of time, I’d prep the space. Depending on the class size, I’d rearrange the desks to be in a circle. And I’d usually put something thematically-relevant on my board. That might be an image from the scene or pertinent questions I wanted students to think about.
This year, I also required that students complete their Hamlet Motif and Theme Tracker. Here’s another part of my Hamlet lesson plans I incorporated to set students up for success on the essay. Students were responsible for making note of motifs as we read the play. At the end of each lesson, I’d give students time to copy relevant quotes and analyze them. These then became the basis for our analytical essay.
hamlet LEsson pLans Assessment: Analytical Essay
Which all builds to our culminating task of my Hamlet lesson plans: an analytical essay that assesses Hamlet’s mental state.
The creation of this essay’s prompt came about quite organically. As I was reading Hamlet the first time myself, I kept thinking: Man, this guy could possibly be a genius.
In general, the prompt asks students to assess Hamlet’s sanity – or lack thereof. For the essay, I required a few things of students.
- Students had to take a side; they couldn’t argue, “Well, he was sane here but insane there.”
- Students had to back up their argument with textual evidence, at least one direct quotation per body paragraph
- Students had to address all questions within each prompt
Admittedly, just a night or two before I introduced this to students, I had one senior ask me: “Can we work with a partner on this?” I’m sure you’ve had similar students ask similar questions. And you’ve probably wondered, “Are they asking this just so they can cleverly share the workload?” I won’t put it past this senior that he wanted to do just that. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt. And I gave my Hamlet lesson plans some more thought.
What I came up with reminds me of dueling pianos you see at dive bars down in New Orleans. I wondered if there wasn’t a way two students could partner up on the essay and each take a different approach: one convicts Hamlet of his crimes via his sanity. And the other defends his fragile state of mind.
The end result? In my class of sixteen, I had just one group pair up. All others chose to take a stance one way or the other. No matter how they chose to approach the prompt, the essays were awesome. It was so cool to see such complex ideas argued in a literary and formal way.
If you’re interested in learning more about a ready-to-go resource, check this out.
Other Hamlet Resources I Cannot Live Without
As I said before, I love to revisit Hamlet lesson plans. But I’m human, and even I forget some of the details year-to-year.
So one of my favorite resources is the Hamlet Teacher Booklet. This handy booklet features a quick but comprehensive summary for all five acts of the play. Plus it has a quick “Who’s Who” guide of characters. It’s such an awesome resource to have on hand.
And it’s great not only for me if I need a quick refresher, but for my students, too. It serves as a great learning support for students with 504s, IEPs, or language barriers.
Concluding Thoughts
If you are also lucky enough to build Hamlet lesson plans, I hope you found some inspiration here. And I hope, too, you’ll check out the other products I have on my Teachers Pay Teachers page. It isn’t only Hamlet I teach, after all!
And if you’re willing, drop a quick comment or leave me a review to let me know how your Hamlet lesson plans went!
