The Merchant of Venice Comprehension Activities Booklet!

This resource booklet contains a wide range of age-appropriate, engaging, and meaningful comprehension activities for use throughout the reading of William Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ Teachers have found them particularly useful in exam revision, comprehension tasks, or guided reading sessions. They are perfect for aiding the progress of students towards meeting the KS4 expectations within the new National Curriculum framework - this makes the tasks suitable for all examining bodies. Students have found these resources extremely engaging, and for teachers there is explicit information within each task regarding which comprehension strands the task is designed to demonstrate. They also relate to key extracts, characters, and themes from the play ensuring that students gain a deep understanding of the text.

Activities within the booklet include:

• ‘Context: Shakespearean Times’ - to aid students with ‘Drawing on knowledge of the purpose, audience and context of the writing, including its social, historical and cultural context and the literary tradition to which it belongs, to inform evaluation;’
• ‘Shakespeare’s Description’ - to aid students with ‘Analysing a writer’s choice of vocabulary, form, grammatical and structural features, and evaluating their effectiveness and impact;’
• ‘Shylock’ and ‘Bassanio’ character profiles- to aid students with ‘Seeking evidence in the text to support a point of view, including justifying inferences with evidence;’
• ‘Editing the Play’ - to aid students with ‘Making an informed personal response, recognising that other responses to a text are possible and evaluating these.’

Plus many, many more activities (the booklet is around 30 pages in length!) I’ve also added it as a PDF in case the formatting differs on your computer.

All images are licensed for commercial use, and are cited on a separate document (included).