FREE ‘William Shakespeare’ Topical Pack for Schools
Shakespeare Week 2025 takes place between 24th and 30th March. An annual event organised by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, its aim as always is to help make primary school-aged children’s early experiences of Shakespeare positive and enriching ones.
This year for the first time, the week of celebrations also has an extra focus. Following the Birthplace Trust’s celebration of ‘The Women Who Made Shakespeare’, the spotlight is on Shakespeare’s iconic female characters. Think Lady Macbeth, Juliet and Viola (Twelfth Night) to name but a few!
The Shakespeare Week website has hundreds of free resources you can dip into and a number of online events for schools are scheduled during the week itself. Here at Busy Things, we have some fantastically engaging activities delivering content about Shakespeare interactively to appeal to your young learners. We share some of these below; others are included within the links to previous years’ blogs.
Online Shakespeare activities
New for 2025, we have our Interview William Shakespeare activity, which is the first of a new series that will enable children to interact personally with significant historical figures.
Harnessing A.I. to expand and customise the learning experience, it will allow your pupils to ask Shakespeare questions about his life and works to deepen their understanding of life as a playwright in Tudor times.
It’s a definite must-play activity and perfect for learning more about the women in Shakespeare’s plays because your questions can be as broad or specific as you want. You could ask about writing for Queen Elizabeth I, his rivalry with Ben Jonson or find out more about the mysterious and sinister witches in Macbeth!
Please note: This activity harnesses the power of A.I. to deliver incredible personalised results. It should behave like Shakespeare himself and respond appropriately for children. We trust that it will do this and provide accurate facts, however, as with all A.I., there is a small risk that it will perform less than perfectly. We recommend that you test it out first before allowing your pupils to. If you are unhappy with the results, you can decide not to use the activity and/or turn all A.I. content off in Busy Things’ global settings.
Children will also enjoy the following:
- Writing projects about Shakespeare himself, his plays and the Globe Theatre
- Interactive worksheets focusing on Shakespeare’s life
- Interactive worksheets based on Shakespeare’s plays
- Writing their own material based on Shakespeare’s plays
- Finding out more about life in general in Tudor times
More details are provided in this blog.
If you’re already a subscriber or trialist, simply log in and type ‘Shakespeare’ into the ‘Search’ Teacher tool to find the activities. If you’ve not got a login, why not take a 28-day free trial and see what there is? Just click here and set one up.
Offline Shakespeare activities
Offline, we have our new and improved Shakespeare topical pack for schools. Extended for 2025, it now includes:
- A William Shakespeare fact sheet
- A classifying activity, helping children understand which plays are comedies, tragedies and/or histories
- A Shakespearean phrase-matching activity
- Romeo and Juliet-based worksheets
- A sonnet-writing activity
- Well-known quotes from the works of Shakespeare
It’s free to download, whether you’re a subscriber, currently trialing Busy Things or completely new to us. You just need to provide your details below:
Closing note
We’d love to know what you think about our new Interview activity, our topical pack and the other Shakespeare activities and welcome your comments below. Any feedback you give will help us understand what you like most so we can create more similar activities in the future. Thank you!