Progeny Press Macbeth Study Guide

by Lisa
(Vero Beach, FL)

Progeny Press has a great selection of reproducible litertaure guides available. We used their guide written by Michael S. Gilleland and desinged for grades 9-12 to accompany our study of Macbeth (18.99).

The guide provides a fair amount background information on the both the play origins and author as well as a synopsis of the play. In particular, I liked the suggested pre-reading activities, which included scripture reading that gave a parallel situation from the Bible (David and Saul), map work, suggested videos to view, and research of the time period of the play.

The study is separated according the the acts of the play and provides and a wonderful hierarchy of activities which include vocabulary, general questions (factual), character studies, literary analysis including literary devices and structure, "Dig Deeper" questions which were often accompanied by scripture to teach a biblical principle, and additional creative or artistic activities to enrich the study. There are no matching, True/False or fill in the blank questions. Yea! I love that they really required a lot of reflection and generated great discussions as well as some healthy frustration for my two students to which so much comes easy.

The summative activities were focused primarily on composition which required the student to use research skills and lots of higher level thinking-thank you Mr. Gilleland for pushing our students to think and then translate their thoughts into meaningful composition!

My only suggestions for improvement, I do wish that the he had included some discussion of the language of the time period and provided definitions for some of the now obscure Old English terms. I used "Barron's Shakespeare Made Easy Modern English with side by side Full Original Text" to help us translate the original text.

My second suggestion, larger print on the teacher answer key, my over 40 eyes had to struggle a bit.

Great resource, great value!