Puppet Pals Hamlet - 12th Grade Brit Lit Honors

When teaching Shakespeare, one of my favorite exercises is to have my students condense the text into manageable chunks. I believe this helps students understand the big picture themes. I like to do this at the end of the unit, after we have spent considerable time with the characters and plot lines.

This year, I used Puppet Pals (Director's Pass - $1.50 per device with VPP) on our classroom iPads to accomplish this task and I think it was pretty successful. Some segments are better than others, some make little to no sense at all. But it was a valuable experience and helped my students understand the play better.

The assignment was to take an entire act of Hamlet and cut out non-essential lines to create a 5 minute video. The original language was not supposed to be changed, only edited for time. I started by letting students divide themselves into groups, then groups randomly were chosen to pick the act they wanted to stage. I borrowed a rack of renaissance costumes from the drama department, and we spent much of the first day dressing up and taking pictures for the puppets. The entire project (pictures, filming, editing) took one week of in-class time. A few groups came during study halls to get some extra work done, but the majority were done on time.

The rubric:

One of the reasons I love using Puppet Pals is that it allows students to recite Shakespeare without the fear of standing up in front of an audience. They can hide behind their "puppet", but still learn proper diction. I also wanted my students to think through staging a play - this is why they were given a movement grade. Keep in mind, we did this exercise after reading the play in its entirety as a class, acting out most scenes as we went along. 

*Two students were absent while we created these videos, so I had them do the introduction and conclusion, pretending to be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

My favorite video is Act V - I love how they created different puppets for different expressions and actions. Well done!

The rest of the videos can be viewed on our class channel (techielitstudents) in the Hamlet Playlist.