“Sticks with Heads”

6^th Grade Language Arts Lesson

In order to spice up the sixth grade’s reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Language Arts, the LA teacher and I came up with a unique way to get students more involved with the text and increase understanding. The project is dubbed “Sticks with Heads.” The gist is that we are reenacting the play using celebrities glued to popsicle sticks.

Here is how the project works:

Characters from the book are randomly assigned to each student in the grade level. The grade level will make one complete set of Julius Caesar “Sticks with Heads” for the classes to share. Each student decides on an actor or actress to play the assigned character and writes up his or her justification for the casting. Once approval by the teacher is given, the “stick with head” is created by printing out and adhering a picture of the chosen celebrity’s head atop a typical Roman outfit on a popsicle stick.

Originally, the teacher wanted each class to record the entire play, but the time requirement needed would be substantial. With my suggestion to make this more manageable, each class is to be assigned only certain scenes to record. Then in editing, all of the scenes from each of the classes will be combined into one big movie encompassing the entire play. This twist to the filming creates an incentive to record quality scenes and excitement to later find out what the other classes have produced. Therefore, each class’s intended audience is the other classes.

The reenactment and recording of the play calls for a detailed examination of the setting, character interactions, and the characters involved in the different scenes. It also helps to justify and give purpose to the rereading of the scenes.