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There are many ways to get to know the students. Each of the activities can be used to help the students open up about themselves and help foster relationships between everyone in the class.

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20 Unique Activities to Get To Know Your Students Better

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The best way to build relationships is by taking the time to learn about each other! Here are 20 activities to know your students better.

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Each game can help with student understanding and make the lessons more engaging.

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10 Engaging Games for your ELA Classroom

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Gamification. Spellcheck says it’s not a word, but it’s so hot right now in education. How can we get our students more interested in learning by introducing gaming elements to their work? And how can we

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Which alternative to an essay works best for your learning and engagement. These alternatives can make a normal essay more creative and fun.

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12 Essay Alternatives That Will Make Your Students Think Outside The Box

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We all know wrapping up a novel or unit doesn’t mean your students have to write formal essays every single time. So how can I asses student learning in meaningful ways that push them to thin…

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103 Things to Do Before, During, or After Reading

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This article offers a collection of interactive activities that help kids become more involved in the stories that they read.

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These activities can help a student better understand their reading, by using techniques to organize their thoughts and to write out explanations.

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Reading activities are vital for academic performance, but also for all other aspects of life. By the time they're in high school, students should have already mastered their reading skills, which allows them to work on efficiency, speed, and improving reading comprehension for complex technical subjects. This is where reading activities for high school students come into play.

High school students are teenagers with a rebellious spirit and sometimes a disinterested attitude toward school and reading in general, as their social life is becoming more important. Nonetheless, high school is also a time when students need to think about their future and make life-altering decisions regarding their future career path.

You can understand how, in a situation like the one described above, reading comprehension and good reading habits are essential for students' future. But, how do you engage students in potentially intense reading materials without disengaging them? With reading activities and strategies that will make reading a fun and meaningful experience, of course!

In this article, we'll focus on 17 effective reading activities for high school that you can introduce in three phases: pre-, during, and post-reading. Each cluster of reading activities has its specific purpose and benefits. Best of all, we made sure the activities are based on general principles and flexibility, meaning you can use them regardless of whether you're teaching English Literature, Science, or any other subject.

Pre-Reading Activities for High School Students

The first cluster of reading activities is called pre-reading activities because they precede the reading assignment. Their aim is to facilitate reading and improve comprehension by preparing the student for the topic. To illustrate this, think of a paper on the causes of the Revolutionary War. In fact, this is a good example that we're going to stick with throughout this article in order to visualize the nature of the reading activities.

So, the students need to read a paper about the Revolutionary War. What might facilitate or otherwise impair the reading comprehension, speed, or learning process for this assignment?

Three Pillars for Good Reading Skill in Academic Context

Reading comprehension will primarily depend on previous knowledge, general vocabulary, and the familiarity of specific terminology (not counting individual differences between students). Speed and efficacy will depend on the reading strategies and it mainly affects the students' reading motivation and attitude. The learning process, on the other hand, depends on many different things, but knowing what to pay attention to, how to organize the content, and sharing impressions with others helps immensely.

These three elements roughly define the outcome of all reading activities in one way or another. Therefore, we should keep them in mind when deciding when a reading activity helps the students. For instance, reading comprehension is tightly associated with precious knowledge, vocabulary, and familiarity with the topic which is what pre-reading activities target. On the other hand, the speed and efficacy of reading depend more on the reading strategies implemented during reading. Now, if you think post-reading activities help the learning process the most, you're right, but learning is also very dependent on the pre-reading activities, and the student's motivation.

Let's start with the pre-reading activities!

Pre-Reading Activities

Word Association

Word association is a powerful technique that's mostly implemented in the classroom when children are still learning how to read. However, word associations are also very useful when students are required to read a text on a complex topic or a new subject. With this technique, children will activate the right vocabulary needed for processing the text.

How to use word association? There are two ways. First, you can use abstract words for which children need to find words with similar meanings or instances where the same words would have a different meaning. Another way is for kids to match words with definitions or practical applications of that word without changing the meaning.

Just make sure that all the words used in the word-association task complement the reading material and activate the students' vocabulary that will help them effectively read the text.

Discussions

The second pre-reading activity is an open discussion before the students read the material. We know that discussions are essential as a post-reading activity, but they're also incredibly helpful before reading. How? Well, they prime students for the reading material by offering some information about the topic and forming expectations on what the material is supposed to address.

It's not the same when you read without knowing or expecting anything, and reading while thinking: "Oh, they explained how the Revolutionary War began, but they didn't mention anything about the causes. I wonder if they will talk about this further in the text because in the discussion, Brian mentioned the Sons of Liberty. They sound so cool, and I wonder what was their influence."

Students will have an opportunity to hear different opinions, for example, what other classmates know about the topic, which naturally stimulates their curiosity and brings the topic on a more concrete and understandable level.

Text Survey

Text Survey is another powerful pre-reading activity for high school students because it teaches them how to identify the value of the text before reading it. In other words, during their university studies, students will be expected to do independent work, read tons of academic articles, and most importantly, filter out relevant information. This is why teaching them how to do text surveys, before investing a lot of time to read the full text, is essential for high school students.

First, let us just say that a text survey is not the same as skimming - a common misconception. The latter is a strategic, selective reading method for highlighting the most important information from the text (we'll explain it in the next section). Text surveying, on the other hand, is a pre-reading activity that allows students to determine if the text is something they actually want to read.

Of course, when you assign students a particular text, they don't need to survey it because they have to read it. But, since surveying is an essential academic reading skill, you can create opportunities where it would be beneficial for students to survey the text.

How to do this? Again, we'll use our Revolutionary War example. Let's say students need to prepare a presentation on this topic. Share with them ten papers that approach this topic from different angles or discuss different causes, effects, or consequences, and so on. Assign each student a specific task - what their presentation should be about, and ask them to base it on the information from the papers.

Now, some of the papers won't even deal with the subtopics some of the students need to take. This is why, unless they want to read all the 10 or 15 papers, they'll need to survey them to find which one is the best fit for their assignment.

Surveying involves looking at the authors, headline, abstract and keywords (if available), the chapter titles, subheadings, date, etc. Basically, all the information that stands out and was used to outline the text. It's an extremely beneficial technique because it takes only 5-10 minutes and saves a lot of time.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming can be done within the discussion or as a separate pre-reading activity. Just like word association, it helps students to activate their previous knowledge on the topic, make them think, and form hypotheses about the text's scope and purpose.

Within the classroom, you can organize brainstorming sessions in different ways, but here's one example.

Show students the book cover or the headline of a paper they need to read and ask them the following questions:

1. What comes to mind when you see this cover/headline? (write down the words)

2. What do you think this text/book is about?

3. Why do you think the text/book is about xx (make them associate the topic with the course itself)?

4. In one word, what do you think it's the main underlying message of this text/book?

5. In one word, why do you think I chose this for us to read?

Speed Chatting

We're all familiar with the concept of speed dating, and I assume high school students are too, which is what makes this pre-reading activity even more fun. Speed chatting is based on the concept of speed dating, only in speed chatting the purpose is to find as much as you can about the topic, instead of the person.

How to organize speed chatting? Introduce a topic, let's say the Revolutionary War. Then, before they need to read a book or a text on that topic, ask them to go on speed chatting with each and every one of their classmates, sharing their previous knowledge about that topic. Usually, students should sit in pairs, one against another, and speak about the topic for one minute before moving on and speaking with another classmate.

As you may assume, the benefit of speed chatting is that it maximizes the students' previous knowledge before they read a topic. In other words, if one student knows a lot about the topic, that will be shared among everyone like gossip.

Introducing Vocabulary

A more formal pre-reading activity involves you sharing a glossary with important, new, or difficult words that students will encounter in the book or in the assigned text. However, make sure you all engage and discuss the glossary in the classroom and out loud, instead of expecting the students to go over it alone. For instance, each student can read a word in front of everyone and make a sentence in which they apply the word. This is because some students might be too shy to say that they don't understand some of the words.

Video Introduction

Watching movies, TEDtalks, video tutorials or animated visual presentations is not reading, but it's a great way to prepare students for reading a text on a specific topic. In our example about the Revolutionary War, seeing a short movie, an animation with a timeline, the landscape, or simply how people re-enact the war, will put visual images in their heads while reading the text later, which helps to remember and understand the content in a faster and easier manner.

Questions

In many of the above-mentioned examples, we've seen that questions are a great way to make students think, activate their previous knowledge, or get them talking about the topic. However, thinking about questions as a pre-reading activity is a little different.

According to Tudor (1989), there are five categories of content-related pre-reading activities, including pre-questions that the text should answer and questions that activate previous knowledge. In fact, the author also included content organizers, vocabulary activities, and predictions. It's interesting that he found predictions and questions that activate the students' previous knowledge are a lot more effective for reading comprehension than vocabulary exercises. It's proposed that this phenomenon is due to the ability of students to use contextual cues and overcome vocabulary deficits thanks to background knowledge.

Reflective or summary questions formulated as "What we've learned in this activity?" or "Based on everything, what can we expect to learn from the text/book?" are good examples of questions that activate background knowledge and work perfectly when implemented after speed chatting, brainstorming, or discussions.

The answers to these questions should be in the form of predictions that students expect to be fulfilled by reading the assigned literature.

Strategic Reading Activities

Strategic reading activities for high school are activities that students can implement while reading the text, regardless of the topic of the material. They help them to better organize the material, give them a sense of structure, improve reading comprehension, but also increase the speed and efficacy of reading, which in turn prevents students from becoming disengaged when they come across long reading materials.

1. Skimming - the first strategy involves quickly skimming the material before students engage with it on a more in-depth level. However, it's not and should not be a replacement for reading (which is why we classified it as a separate reading activity). Skimming is the process of skipping details, data, graphs, or other elaboration for the purpose of getting the main (big picture) idea or argument behind the text and preventing one to lose oneself within the details. After skimming, the students should read the text again, this time paying attention to all the details.

2. BEP - Beginning and End-Paragraph - the BEP is an awesome reading habit after just reading an academic text. The reason for this is that more often than not, academic literature is long and complex, which might make some students overwhelmed - not knowing what was the purpose of the text and its conclusions. Therefore, quickly going through the introduction and the end-paragraph again gives a nice overview and refreshes students' memory.

3. Key Fragments - ask students to always think about the most important pieces of information (according to them) that the text introduces. Then, they can highlight this information and use it later, without having to go over the whole text again. Also, when studying, these key fragments should be enough for the student to connect all the other information around them.

Post-Reading Activities for High School Students

Finally, we got to the last cluster of reading activities that help students consolidate knowledge and improve the learning process after reading the material. When thinking about post-reading activities for high school, ask yourself "What could students do to engage with the material after reading it?" Basically, post-reading activities should require students to use what they've read in one form or another.

In addition, we propose six different activities which you can organize after the students finish reading the material.

Outlining

The first, and probably the simplest post-reading activity is to ask students to outline the text based on specific requirements, depending on the topic and subject. For example, if the students are reading a book or a text about the Revolutionary War, ask them to outline the material based on the timeline on which events occurred, or the causes, effects, and consequences discussed. When talking about a topic, there's more than one way in which you can organize the content. Therefore, you can ask students to outline the material the way they think it's most informative, or as previously discussed in the example, give them specific instructions.

Graphic Organizing

Very similar to outlining, graphic organization of the material is basically a visual representation of the outline of the text. You can ask kids to prepare a graphic organization of the text after their usual outline. What do they need to include?

First, they can customize it any way they want to. The two important things which every graphic organization should have are "nodes" where a message or a word or a symbol is drawn and "connections" between the elements of the graph. The connections are usually presented with lines and other variations representing different things. For example, a sequence of arrows pointed only in one direction might indicate a timeline between the "nodes." However, they can also be color-coded or pattern-coded, representing different relations.

The value of this activity is that it engages kids to once again think of the structure and connections between different elements of the text, which is very helpful for consolidating knowledge and indicates that the text was fully comprehended.

Summary Writing

A more classic post-reading activity in high schools is writing a summary of the text or book that students have just read. This is sometimes a graded assignment with specific instruction or topic, but it's maybe even more helpful if it becomes a habit. Summaries don't have to be long or detailed and the main idea is for students to work on their skills of extracting valuable information from a piece of text. That is, from the summary you can evaluate how much the students have understood the material and what kinds of information they focused on.

Then, you can give them feedback. Again, following the example of the Revolutionary War, some students might be focusing too much on the dates without mentioning the causes or the reasons, others might only talk about the causes and use narration (writing it like a story), without remembering any year, and so on.

Character/Topic Analysis

As the texts become more and more complex, students might start to struggle to keep up. For instance, their comprehension might be good, meaning they understand the texts, but can they meaningfully analyze the text or even attempt to critique it with well-formed counter-arguments? This is what you need to find out to make sure they're hitting the learning objectives set for the year.

To help them out, give them frequent readings and after that share a template for them to use in order to analyze the topic/character/event. Here's an example of one type of template for analysis:

Graph 1: What's the argument/strategy/style/feature used?

Graph 2: Textual evidence - Where can we find that in the text?

Graph 3: What's the purpose for using that argument/strategy/style/feature (what is the author trying to tell us)?

Graph 4: How does this argument or strategy support the claim?

Graph 5: What's the effect?

Presentation

We've mentioned presentations a couple of times before, and that's because they're a great way for kids to present the text they've been reading. In presentations, students have visual freedom (adding graphics, animations, images, symbols, drawings, etc), as well as writing freedom (they present orally, which means the writing serves only them).

Other students may ask questions or comment which is a really great way for everyone to see how others understood the text.

Discussion

Finally, the last reading activity for high school students is, again, discussion, but this time as a post-reading activity. How is it different? Well, during the discussion after reading the text, students should share their general impressions. Here are a couple of questions usually answered during the final discussion.

Were your expectations met?

What was surprising or unexpected?

What was learned?

What questions were raised while reading?

Where can we go from here?

Do you need a follow-up reading for better comprehension?

Do you want to elaborate your knowledge on a specific aspect of the topic?

What got your interest the most?

Before You Go

As we've seen, there are many different reading activities for high school students that can promote reading comprehension, motivation, speed, and efficacy of reading, as well as the learning process itself. Hopefully, we did a good job organizing this article and you're satisfied with the way we classified the reading activities. We believe that this way, you can make clear connections with the benefits obtained with each of the activities and their overall purpose.

Of course, you don't have to implement all of the activities, that would be way too overwhelming which defeats the purpose because it will eventually make reading an undesired activity. Instead, pick the ones you think will best work for your students or try different ones and see what the students' feedback is.

Finally, if you need any help on any of the reading topics, don't forget to head over to our website and pick out a worksheet! They'll engage the students, teach them something more about the topic, and save you a lot of time! Also, make it a habit to regularly check our blog, as we share new informational guides, such as this one, every week!

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The 17 Best Engaging Reading Activities for High School

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Improve reading comprehension and prepare students for upcoming challenges with our reading activities for high school students.

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This article gives multiple ways to introduce the Shakespeare lesson to the students in a way that will keep them engaged. If one doesn't work, try another.

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There are so many sayings and phrases that we use today that come from Shakespeare's works. Sayings such as "One fell swoop" and "Break the ice" all come from Shakespeare. The Bespoke ELA Intro. to Shakespeare Kit contains a list of sayings and phrases we owe to Shakespeare. Students are to go through each one on the list and check off the ones they have either heard or have said themselves and then consider how Shakespeare's works have influenced our language today.

Create an Infographic or One-Pager of Shakespeare's Life

Another low-prep, no-prep activity to introduce a Shakespeare unit is to have students create either an infographic or one-pager about Shakespeare's life. They can use infographic templates from Canva.com, which are very user-friendly- or have students create one-pagers by hand. You can give them some guidelines that they must include:

1. Ten facts about Shakespeare's life

2. Three of his most famous plays

3. 2-3 images that relate to the information.

Students can then share their infographics or put their one-pagers on display in the classroom to reference throughout their study of Shakespeare's works.

Agree-Disagree Statement Activity

For this activity, students are given 5-10 debatable thematic statements that encompass themes from Shakespeare's works. Students can then either agree or disagree with each statement and then write their rationales for their side of the argument. Alternatively, you can have students complete this activity as a four-corners lesson. To do it this way, designate the four corners of your classroom as: "Strongly Agree," "Agree," "Disagree," "Strongly Disagree." As you read out the statements to the class, students can move to the corner that represents their opinion on the thematic idea. You can select specific statements that correlate to the specific play of study, or you can use more generalized thematic statements that are represented by Shakespeare's body of work as a whole. Here are some statements to get you started:

You can find this activity as part of the Bespoke ELA Intro. to Shakespeare Kit if you'd like something ready to print and use.

Film Clips

Don't be afraid to use film clips of scenes from the play before students begin to read. After all, Shakespeare was never meant to be read sitting in a desk. It was meant to be seen as a performance. Show students clips of the most important scenes from the play and have them summarize what they think happens in each scene and then discuss. Beginning this way will help dispel comprehension issues as students read.

The Seven Ages of Man Acting Challenge

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10 Engaging Ways to Introduce any Shakespeare Play in Secondary ELA - Bespoke ELA: Essay Writing Tips + Lesson Plans

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This list of activities presents engaging ways to introduce a Shakespeare play. From Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth to Hamlet to Julius Caesar, these activities are sure to engage your students in the world and language of Shakespeare. These activities are appropriate for middle school and high schoo

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These multiple tests on Shakespeare's plays can be helpful with understanding and testing what you know about the different plays

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Test your knowledge of Shakespeare's plays with our multiple choice quizzes

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Think and share. What do you think about the article

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Think and share. What do you think about the article

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Do you think Brave New World predicted things that are happening today?

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When most people think of what dystopia our society is sprinting towards, they tend to think of , The Handmaid's Tale, or the Hunger Games. These top selling, well known, and well-written titles are excellent warnings of worlds that could come to pass that we would all do well to read.

However, one lesser-known dystopian novel has done a much better job at predicting the future than these three books. Brave New World, written in 1931 by author, psychonaut, and philosopher Aldous Huxley, is well known but hasn't quite had the pop-culture breakthrough that the other three did.

This is regrettable, as it offers us a detailed image of a dystopia that our society is not only moving towards but would be happy to have.

(Getty Images)

For those who haven't read it, Brave New World is the description of a nightmare society where everybody is perfectly happy all the time. This is assured through destroying the free will of most of the population using genetic engineering and Pavlovian conditioning, keeping everybody entertained continuously with endless distractions, and offering a plentiful supply of the wonder drug Soma to keep people happy if all else fails.

The world state is a dictatorship which strives to assure order. The dictatorship is managed by ten oligarchs who rely on an extensive bureaucracy to keep the world running. The typical person is conditioned to love their subservience and either be proud of the vital work they do or be relieved that they don't have to worry about the problems of the world.

Global stability is ensured through the Fordist religion, which is based on the teachings of Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud and involves the worship of both men. The tenets of this faith encourage mass consumerism, sexual promiscuity, and avoiding unhappiness at all costs. The assembly line is praised as though it were a gift from God.

Huxley's dystopia is especially terrifying in that the enslaved population absolutely loves their slavery. Even the characters who are smart enough to know what is going on (and why they should be concerned) are instead content with everything that is happening. Perhaps more terrifying than other dystopian novels, in Brave New World there is truly no hope for change.

The similarities between the world of today and the world of the book are many, even if our technology hasn't quite caught up yet.

While the human assembly line described in the first part of the story is still a far-off fantasy, the basic concepts that make it work are already here. Today, people make choices to influence the genetic makeup of their children regularly.

Pre-natal screening has created the ability for many parents to decide if they wish to carry a disabled fetus to term or not. In Iceland, this has resulted in the near eradication of new cases of Down Syndrome in the country. Almost 100% of detected cases lead to an abortion shortly after.

Similarly, testing for a child's sex before birth is a well-known procedure that leads to a wide gender gap in many countries. Less well known is the process of sperm sorting, which allows for a couple to choose the gender of their child as part of the process of in-vitro fertilization.

The above examples suggest we're open to soft eugenics already. Imagine what would happen if people could determine their child's potential IQ before birth, or how rebellious they will be as a teenager. It would be difficult to suggest that the development of such technology would not be hailed as progress by those who could afford to use it. Huxley's visions of a genetically perfected upper caste might be available soon.

As this article suggests, some choice in baby design is already here and more will be available soon.

The characters of Brave New World enjoy endless distractions between their hours at work. Various complex games have been invented, movies now engage all five senses, and there are even televisions at the feet of death beds. Nobody ever has to worry about being bored for long. The idea of enjoying solitude is taboo, and most people go out to parties every night.

In our modern society, most people genuinely can't go thirty minutes without wanting to check their phones. We have, just as Huxley predicted, made it possible to abolish boredom and time for spare thoughts no matter where you are. This is already having measurable effects on our mental health and our brain structure.

Huxley wasn't warning us against watching television or going to the movies occasionally; he says in this interview with Mike Wallace that TV can be harmless, but rather against the constant barrage of distraction becoming more important in our lives than facing the problems that affect us. Given how stressful people find the idea of a tech-free day and how we take our pop culture so seriously that it was targeted for use by Russian bots, he might have been onto something.

Brave New World 's favorite pill, Soma, is quite the drug. In small doses it causes euphoria. In moderate doses, it causes enjoyable hallucinations, and in large doses, it is a tranquilizer. It is probably a pharmacological impossibility, but his concept of a society that pops pills to eradicate any vestige of negative feelings and escape the doldrums of the day is very real.

While it seems odd to say that we are moving towards Brave New World in this era when official policy is opposed to drug use, Huxley would suggest we consider it a blessing, since a dictatorship that encouraged drug use to zonk out their population would be a powerful, if light handed one.

While today we have a war on drugs, it is not on all drugs. Anti-depressants, a powerful tool for the treatment of mental illness, are so popular that one in eight Americans are on them right now. This doesn't include the large number of Americans on tranquilizers, anti-anxiety medications, or those who self-medicate with alcohol or increasingly legal marijuana.

These drugs aren't quite Soma, but they bear a striking resemblance in function and use.

In the book, the stability of the world state is partly based on total employment. A character informs us that automation has been purposely stalled to assure everybody can work since free time would give them enough extra time to think about their condition. Mass employment relies on mass consumption, however, and numerous systems are in place to assure everybody keeps using new products even when they don't need anything.

Consumerism is a significant element in all major economies today. While it makes sense that a company would have an incentive to keep us buying things to remain profitable, Huxley's point is that consumerism can also be used to keep us pointlessly chasing after items that we think we need to be happy as a distraction from exploring other pursuits.

While Huxley thought a dictatorship would have to condition people to want to buy new things and throw out last year's products to buy similar but newer ones, the lines and fights at Black Friday sales suggest otherwise. Or the lines for every new release of the iPhone.

And just in case you thought it was only corporations getting in on the pressure, don't forget George Bush wanted you to fight terror by shopping.

In our modern lives, a similar view on happiness as exists in the novel is developing. In his book The Happiness Industry, William Davies argues that modern capitalism has come across the concept of making happiness the only acceptable mental state and run with it to make more money. Our new found slew of Corporate Happiness Officers and self-help gurus are all designed to keep us happy, consuming, and unwilling to question the larger system in place, he argues.

This notion is summarized in his book in one, jargon-laden, sentence:
The relentless fascination with quantities of subjective feeling can only possibility divert critical attention away from broader political and economic problems.
While claims that we are redefining unhappiness as unacceptable might seem overblown, the standard manual of mental illness now says grieving for deceased loved ones more than a few days is problematic. Perhaps Mr. Davies is onto something.

Huxley expressed concern in his follow-up book Brave New World Revisited that the increasing complexity of technology and global problems had led to a concentration of power both in business and government. This concentration, he argued, not only made people more comfortable with the idea of being subjugated but also made dictatorship easier to enact.

Today, we have a higher concentration of wealth and power than ever before. In the United States, the top 1% are richer than ever, six corporations control 90% of the media, and the power of undemocratic institutions such as corporations or byzantine bureaucracies are greater than ever before. Many Americans choose not to vote and have the same influence on their government that they would if they had no right to vote.

This can lead to situations little different than that of 1984 but without the hard-totalitarian edge that came with it. In 1984 there was only one television station, and there was no attempt to hide the fact that the government controlled it. In the United States today dozens of seemingly different networks are controlled by a few conglomerates and often promote the same worldview and opinions as a result.

Huxley himself warned against this very situation when he talked about how we were approaching his dystopia back in 1958:

Well, at the present the television, I think, is being used quite harmlessly; it's being used, I think, I would feel, it's being used too much to distract everybody all the time. But, I mean, imagine which must be the situation in all communist countries where the television, where it exists, is always saying the same things the whole time; it's always driving along. It's not creating a wide front of distraction it's creating a one-pointed, drumming in of a single idea, all the time. It's obviously an immensely powerful instrument.

Despite being able to find this out or turn the channel, millions of people willingly continue to watch what might be called propaganda from friendly faces. Indeed, they love it. This soft totalitarianism is often hard to detect or state an objection to, which Slavoj Zizek argues is the point.

Huxley thought we could save ourselves, though we had to act quickly. While his concerns around overpopulation and eugenics have been shown to be bunk by the march of history, his other ideas still have merit.

In his follow up book Brave New World Revisited, he argues for the decentralization of power as a means to restore the value of democratic government to the typical person who might otherwise realize their vote is meaningless and lose faith in democracy as a result. He suggests that we can better educate people for freedom by drawing their attention to the methods of demagogues and sleazy advertisers. He encouraged those seeking freedom to move to the countryside or to establish stronger neighborhood ties in the cities to resist the pressure to only engage with others as an economic unit and not as a full human being.

He was also warm to the ideas of syndicalism and worker cooperatives, which seek to restructure workplaces to feature workers democratically managing them. He saw this as both a way to decentralize the economy and improve democratic participation.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a prediction of a nightmare he thought we would be safe from for at least a few hundred years when he wrote it in 1931. By 1958 he realized he had been very optimistic. While we aren't entirely doomed to the pleasant slavery he envisioned quite yet, the march of progress continues to bring us the tools which make it ever simpler to enact. If we will make the choices needed to avoid it or if we will willingly cry out to be saved from our freedom remains to be answered.

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'Brave New World' predicted today's world better than any other novel

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When most people think of what dystopia our society is sprinting towards, they tend to think of , The Handmaid's Tale , or the Hunger Games . These top selling, well known, and well-written titles are excellent warnings of worlds that could come to pass that we would all do well to read.

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This is a good and fun group activity to try and understand Shakespearean language. What does he actually try to say in moderation terms.

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Here are a few of our favorite Shakespeare videos for the classroom. You can also check out our playlist of favorite Shakespeare videos here (and be sure to subscribe to WeAreTeachers YouTube channel while you're at it.)

Remember to check out these videos yourself before you show them to your students because only you know what will work for the children in your classroom.

What's So Special About Shakespeare?

Michael Rosen explains in less than eight minutes why Shakespeare rocks. A great piece to kick off any Shakespeare unit! Rosen also shares short videos of his favorite Shakespearean insults as well as a few everyday phrases used during Shakespeare's time.

The Story of William Shakespeare for Kids

An illustrated look at Shakespeare's life, his times, and his works in under ten minutes.

CBeebies: Who is William Shakespeare?

In just five minutes, viewers get to "meet" Shakespeare and learn a few fun facts about his life and why he became a writer and playwright.

The Secret to Teaching Shakespeare

The advice that author James Shapiro gives to teachers in this short video is invaluable. A must-see!

Shakespeare for Kids

The Traveling Teacher gives viewers a quick look at William Shakespeare's life while she visits Stratford-Upon-Avon. She also shares information about Shakespeare's sonnet writing.

Horrible Histories: Shakespeare Goes to School

William Shakespeare goes to a modern-day school, and he tries to "wow" them with his knowledge. A super-cute and silly look at what Shakespeare might be like if he walked into a school today.

Shakespeare's Tragedies and an Acting Lesson: Crash Course #15

This 12-minute video is packed with information, and it's totally geared toward getting kids interested in Shakespeare's theater. Visuals are amazing here; this is well worth your time.

Teaching Shakespeare: Introducing Iambic Pentameter

One of the many, many videos from the Royal Shakespeare Company, this video is a great place to start for teachers. It provides some hands-on ways to introduce rhythm in Shakespeare's works.

Ken Ludwig at Politics & Prose, on his book, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare

Tons of great, hands-on ideas for teaching Shakespeare to children. A conversation with the author. Really great resource!

Why Shakespeare Loved Iambic Pentameter

Super resource for students to finally grasp why Shakespeare was so in love with iambic pentameter. This video is a quick peek into the rhythm of Shakespeare's words and why they're important.

How NOT to Hate Shakespeare, by Rob Crisell

The idea behind this Tedx Talk is to stop people from watching or reading Shakespeare and to instead experience his plays. Super interesting take on this topic.

What Would Shakespeare Think of Us? by Dan Poole and Giles Terera

Two actors take a look at why we're still talking about Shakespeare after 400 years. They also talk about "Shakespism", the aversion to all things Shakespeare.
We'd love to hear-what are your favorite Shakespeare videos? Come and share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Be sure to check out our other favorite teaching videos on YouTube:

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Our Favorite Videos for Teaching Shakespeare

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Here are a few of our favorite Shakespeare videos for the classroom. You can also check out our playlist of favorite Shakespeare videos here (and be sure to subscribe to WeAreTeachers YouTube channel while you're at it.)