Shakespeare Booklet: Heroes (KS3)

This 12 page booklet is designed to give students a taster of a range of Shakespeare plays and characters who might be considered heroes, or tragic heroes. This booklet was originally designed for year 8 but would work across the whole of Key Stage 3.

The booklet offers activities alongside extracts giving students a taste of Shakespeare and his characters and methods, rather than the plot of whole plays. It also gives students a gentle introduction to the idea of the tragic hero.

The booklet includes the following extracts/activities:

• A front page which allows students to consider heroic qualities.
• A prior knowledge page where students can enter what they already know about Shakespeare and three key plays.
• A terminology page with key play and strucural terminology.
• A page with gap-fill definitions of tragic hero, foil, aside and hamartia.
• A rank the heroic events page, where students must rank a range of events which link to the extracts they will later study for a S+L lesson.
• A range of descriptions about Macbeth from across each act in the play, with a heroic/villainous graph to plot his change (also useful at KS4).
• Two small extracts with descriptions about Macbeth from the start and end of the play.
• A range of extracts looking at Shakespeare’s heroines: Juliet, Cordelia, and Cleopatra
• A speech from ‘Hamlet’
• A summary pagewhere students rank all of the characters and answer overview questions of the unit.
• A common vocabulary page to create a Shakespeare glossary.