Lessons Plans for a Great Hamlet Unit: Pre-Reading Activities, Discussion Questions, Art Project, & Exam

When you think of Shakespeare’s classic play, you might not think it has much to do with the iPhone-wielding students in your class, but I’ve found that students connect more than you’d expect to the young Dane and the struggles he faces.

There are so many great questions to tackle: What happens to us when we die? Do the ends justify the means? Why do we put things off, especially when it matters most?   

Still, this play is not an easy win. The language is more than just challenging—it’s nuanced and subtle. There are long stretches where very little seems to happen, and then suddenly, there’s a bloodbath. And the fact that it’s probably one of the most famous texts ever written in English adds even more pressure.  

It would be great if you could just send kids home with a copy of the text and have them come back the next day ready to dive into a heated discussion. (I’ll admit that was my only strategy when I first started teaching!) However, the truth is that students won’t just power through Hamlet on their own—they need scaffolding, routines, and a few well-placed moments of brilliance to stay with you to the end.

That said, I have taught the tale of the depressed prince to all levels of classes, from standard level to AP, and it has consistently been a highlight of the year for my students—and me!

If you’re struggling to make your Hamlet unit work, you can check out my Complete Hamlet Unit—or keep reading for my best tips from years of teaching this play about a ghost, a nasty father-in-law, and the most procrastinated revenge ever.

Pre-Reading Activities 

I usually like to do as much warm-up for a Shakespeare play as possible. Getting students more confident with the language and prepared for the themes and emotional reality of the play is really worth the time. But since Hamlet is so very long, I try to get into the text as quickly as possible. So my pre-reading plans take no more than two days.

First, we read Sonnet 73 which I pair with Dylan Thomas’ classic poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”  Sonnet 73 is, like all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, on the surface a poem about love. But what it’s really about is how we talk about death.  The main reason why I love Sonnet 73 for teaching is that I have students draw the three metaphors in the poem as a way of exploring how the speaker shifts and changes from the beginning to the end. Spending a class period analyzing and discussing these poems gets students primed for the big ideas and helps them feel like they can actually read Shakespeare and understand it. 

On the second day, as I handle books and other logistics, students work on some low-key prereading discussion questions and a short fictional writing prompt.  The discussion questions generally result in some unofficial neighbor debates.  Questions like “What does it mean to be a good friend?” or “Revenge or forgiveness?” are simple on the surface but really get students thinking about where their own views lie before we open the text.  

For the fictional prompts, I give students scenarios that will come up in the play like “A pair of friends is ordered to spy on another friend by a powerful leader” or “A gravedigger works to clean out bones in order to bury a new body.”  Then, I have them write from the first person POV as any character in the scenario and make up any details they want.  What’s kind of shocking about this activity is that almost without exception, students tell stories that take place in times and places very different from those of the play, but they anticipate the emotional realities of the characters.  Then, when Hamlet realizes that his friends are spying on him for the king, they remember their own writing about what it’s like to be betrayed.  I think that writing in the first person is really key to this connection and helps students actually feel what the characters are going through.

Teaching Ideas

Once we get into the play, I like to follow the same routine most days. If I’m teaching an especially independent honors or AP class, I might break it up and assign more work for homework, but, for the most part, this routine works too well to change it up.

We start with a bellringer freewrite prompt.  Did I mention that I was getting myself organized while students were working on the pre-reading activities? Uh, I’m probably unorganized again. Having a few moments of quiet at the beginning of every period really helps me get my bearings.  More importantly, though, it helps prime students to think about some of the big questions we’ll be encountering in the reading that day.  So if they spend some time writing on the prompt of “What is some ‘good advice’ that you just can’t bring yourself to follow? they’ll already be considering which elements of Polonius’ advice are solid and which aren’t and why Laertes might not follow it anyway.

Then we listen to an audio of the play as students read along.  Yeah, I know that in a perfect world students would be acting out the play, but this is not a perfect world, and if I never have to spend another minute of my life hearing a teenager butcher the Bard I will die happily. Seriously, though, if you can pull off getting students to act, that’s awesome.  It never worked for me.  Instead, I have them listen to professional actors. I especially love the Arkangel versions of the plays—and they have sound effects!

Students work on close reading questions with increasing independence over time. For the first few days, we keep it really short and mostly work through the questions as a class. Day one has us listening to just Act I scene 1 which is nine minutes long, and day two focuses on Act II, Scene 2. But as students become more familiar with the characters and plot and more comfortable with the language of the play, I gradually increase the length of the listening and the independence of the close reading questions. By the end of the play, we’re listening to 25 or 30 minutes of audio, and students will mostly answer the questions on their own with a quick review of the more challenging questions as a class.

Notebook activities deepen analysis.  Nothing strikes fear into my heart like a few unscheduled minutes at the end of class, and so I always have a variety of notebook activity ideas on hand for when students have finished early or just show signs of needing to change things up a bit.  These activities help students connect to different elements of the text. Making a storyboard of an especially action-filled scene might seem like a fluff activity, but it does really help students synthesize and retain important plot elements.  Similarly, writing a found poem is super low-key, yet it gets students to fully engage with the word choice in a passage.

We watch the entire 1996 film version in class.  I know that a four-hour movie is not really what you want to add to your already-long unit, but I promise this version is so worth it!  The settings and costumes in other versions are perhaps more “accurate” to the period of the play, but the portrayals of the characters in this version are, in my opinion, unmatched by any other adaptation.  Plus it’s the entire text with nothing left out.  What I most enjoy about Branagh’s Hamlet is that both Ophelia and Gertrude are portrayed as complex, strong, relatable characters.  Watching this film with classes is a real journey, but after everything we’ve gone through with the characters, the final scene always hits. 

Great discussion questions bring it all together.  I decided to become an English teacher in a college seminar when I realized it meant I could basically talk about literature forever. For me, discussion is the core of any great unit.  But there are many things that need to come together to get teens engaged in talking about 500-year-old literature. We have great discussions on Hamlet because it’s an incredible play that deals with big ideas, I write questions that don’t lead to easy yes-or-no answers, and—most importantly—students have what they need to actually participate. When they’ve prepped their own ideas with a freewrite, noticed the important details with the close reading questions, and really worked through the challenging language to answer those questions, then and only then can they truly engage with questions like “What causes Ophelia’s insanity?” or “What makes Fortinbras a strong leader?” or “What does it take to kill another human being?”

Final Exam Ideas

I’ll be honest—over the years I started moving away from traditional tests and toward more creative assessments. I think creating something original is a more meaningful experience for students—but honestly, I also got bored of reading the same answers over and over.

But if I do have to give a test, I try to make it as focused on higher level thinking as possible.

I start off with quote IDs and have students write three-part responses for each one: Who says this? What is it about? Why is it important?  I give partial credit for this section. I have found that students who really wrestle with the text—those who work to answer questions in class even if they are not effortlessly understanding the play from the beginning—are the ones who do well on this section.  I’m not trying to trip anyone up; I mostly give them quotes that we analyzed as a class in their close reading questions.  

The second part of the test is short essays, which, if students were active in discussions, are also fairly straightforward.  Questions like “What does the play as a whole suggest about what it means to be a good leader or ruler?” or “What are the different meanings of ‘play’ in the play, and how does Shakespeare enrich the themes of the play as a whole with this extended metaphor?” give students plenty of leeway to include whatever details and ideas they have about the topic—and give me at least some variety to read!!

Sometimes instead and sometimes in addition to the test, I like to have students complete a project or paper as a final assessment.  

One of the most low-key, and a great choice when I need some art in my room, is to have them do a tracking poster. As long as I assign this early on in our study of the play, it works well. Students look for quotes on a specific topic—for Hamlet this includes things like ears (seriously, my favorite!), spying, or birds.  Then, they make a poster with the quotes and some visuals.  The goal of this project is for students to trace a motif or theme through the play and for them to think about the visuals created by the vivid descriptions throughout. While this is a low-key assignment that gives students a lot of freedom, it is also a nice way to challenge them to work through the text independently, analyzing the quotes on their own. 

If I have the time and energy for group projects, I have students write a group play which is a modernization of one scene from Hamlet.  Students “translate” or paraphrase all of the dialogue, making it sound the way people talk today.  They add as many details of plot or setting as they want to modernize it.  Then, they turn in their process steps and perform their plays for the class!  This can be a lot of work, but it really pays off when they start to own a scene of the play.

I hope these ideas help you refresh your Hamlet lesson plans.  If you only try one thing from this post, I think the fictional prompts have the most impact for the least effort!  

And if you’d like to get all of these plans in a ready-to-go format including the close reading questions, extensive answer keys, bellringer freewrite prompts, and quizzes on every act, you can find my complete unit here.