Shakespeare for Spring Break

If laughter is the best medicine, I sure had some great medicine last week. It was Spring Break for the local kids so we took a week off of worksheets in our homeschool and read Shakespeare stories. We had been reading about Shakespeare for our history club and I got the brilliant idea (ha, ha) to put together a little Shakespeare play for our history club to perform. The kids did a condensed version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and it was SO fun to watch them act it out. All the kids laughed so hard as they first attempted to say their super mushy lines but they really pulled it together in the end. Some of them are born actors. We filmed them in action and we’re putting together a little movie. We did about a million re-takes so we’ll definitely have a blooper reel! I laughed more than I can remember laughing in a long time. Here are a few things I learned from this experience:

1. 8 and 9-year-olds can be just as much fun to hang out with as a group of friends my own age.
2. All children love to act but some children love it more than others.  I was impressed with the way some of the kids really got into it. 
3. Kids have more patience and determination than I sometimes give them credit for. The same kids who get restless after 5 minutes of listening to a lesson can go hours and hours making a movie. It helps tremendously if there is a playground nearby that they can play at while they wait for their turn.
4. It’s really important when filming to make sure you push the record button when you want to film. The scenes don’t turn out so well when you do the opposite and push the record button when you want to stop filming. I learned this the hard way.
5. It takes 5 hours of filming to make a 15-minute movie (This would have been really helpful to know before I allotted a one-hour time slot for filming.)
6. It takes many more hours of editing to turn the filmed part into an actual movie--thank you sweetie!
7. Some weeks are just wonderful, this was one of them.