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How to Fit Drama into Your Homeschool
Did you know that high school students can better understand some of the greatest literature of all time by adding drama? I recently found a list online of the top 100 books of all time on the public domain. I selected some of the ones my kids have read in high school to help you add drama to your homeschool while enjoying great literature.
Hi! My name is Danielle and I have homeschooled my kids from Pre-K through high school. We have found a lot of creative ways to fit drama into our homeschool, and now I want to share what I’ve learned and continue to learn with you.
High school gets really busy and if you’re a family with multiple kids it can be tricky to sit down with your high schooler to read books together. Some students don’t have the patience for a read aloud session, while other families have found some great connection time either one-on-one with their high schooler or altogether as a family reading books together.
Whether we read together or separately, I found that it was extremely helpful to read the books my kids were reading, so I could have discussions with them about what they were reading and to make sure they understood the content. There are guides with questions for many books to help you ask good questions, if you haven’t mastered that skill yet, but reading the books is the best way to dig deeper with your student.
It also helps you to gain familiarity with the great literature your student is reading to assess where their comprehension is and determine how they are progressing from year to year. As their homeschool teacher, it’s important to fully understand where they are to better prepare them for college and beyond.
When I led high school students in our homeschool group, in order for the students to understand the literature better, we would have discussions about the characters and plot of each story. We would usually break up the reading so there would be time to dive into various chapters along the way. This led to a better understanding of the entire book as they made clarifications on the themes and plot as they went along, making it easier to understand the story as a whole by the time they were done.
Another really fun way we dug deeper into these stories was to have students act out different scenes or chapters from each book.
In high school, students read much more challenging works, so acting out a scene or different parts of the book or epic poem is incredibly helpful to allow them to slow down and really think about what is being said. In order to act it out, they have to understand it.
Students have learned to contemplate the actions of the characters from their previous experience in debating their choices in middle school and can now take it to another level by really embracing a character or considering the most important parts of the story and sharing those parts with others through dramatic interpretations.
When my kids were in high school, they would act out certain scenes or chapters from a book. This helped them really focus on a section of the story, while sharing with others what the story was all about.
In our homeschool group, students read these challenging works of art, then each took a different section to act out for the younger students in our group. This gave the high school students a way of digging deeper into a portion of the story, learning more about other parts from their fellow students, and helping younger students by exposing them to great literature and preparing them for when they start reading these books.
From the list of best books of all time on the public domain (from shortform.com), I’ve chosen some and broken them down into elementary, middle school and high school (we will cover them all in this series of blogs).
Here’s the list for high school students:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Odyssey by Homer
Iliad by Homer
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Macbeth by Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Bible (I’ve added this to the list because there are always wonderful stories to act out in this best-selling book of all time, according to Guinness World Records, which is also available in the public domain.)
You have access for free to some of the greatest books ever written right at your fingertips. You can add value to your child’s education by including drama while reading these great works of art. I will go into more detail about our drama experiences with some of these classics in Part 2 of High School Students Can Enjoy Great Literature with Drama.
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Looking for more ways to add drama to your homeschool? Check out our plays and drama curriculum related to this list of great literature and much more!
Thanks for joining us!
Danielle at homeschooldrama.com
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