With its challenging language and old world setting, the classic Epic of Beowulf can be difficult to teach in a modern high school classroom. However, with a little bit of inspiration, it is possible to include meaningful, engaging, and fun activities for teaching Beowulf into your unit plan.
In addition to my 11 years of experience teaching Beowulf, I spent the last few months researching the Anglo-Saxon time period and designing creative Beowulf activities to connect with today’s scholars and engage them with the challenging text.
As I share in this post How to do a Diverse ELA Curriculum Audit and this post How to Diversify Your British Literature Class, it is my goal to make sure all students see themselves in each unit I create. British Literature is often male focused, so it was important for me to include creative pairings that ensure all students can see a hero inside themselves.
In our book, Keeping the Wonder: An Educator’s Guide to Magical, Engaging, and Joyful Learning, we divide wonder into four elements: surprise, curiosity, freedom, and inspiration. I thought it would be fun and helpful to organize my ideas for teaching Beowulf in the same way. My Beowulf unit pulls from several ideas from the book, so it’s very fitting. 😊
Adding surprise to your Beowulf Unit
Surprise – A super easy way to transform your classroom and create a flashbulb learning experience is to simply hit play on an ambient media scene. For teaching Beowulf, I like to use mead-hall ambience on the first day of the Beowulf unit plan. Not only does the scene add an element of surprise, but it also provides a setting and cue for the first of many mead-hall meetings students will have throughout the unit.
Though I give detailed instructions in the Beowulf teaching resources, in short, students form mead-hall groups at the start of the Beowulf unit as a little community building activity and then regroup into these mead-halls throughout the unit for group discussions and games (more on this below in the Freedom section!).
I also rather enjoyed this hilarious surprise I played on my students:
It provided a great way to talk about Old English, language change, and the fear of reading aloud!
Getting students curious about Beowulf
Curiosity – When I was preparing for this big Beowulf unit plan update, I polled my teacher friends on Instagram to find out what challenges they faced when teaching Beowulf. I got several responses, but one really piqued my curiosity. She asked, “Why do we even read Beowulf??? The focus on British lit in ELA confounds me.” Whao! This is a valid argument for a different post, but this opinion made me question my own bias and set me down a path of research with a new lens.
First, I do think the themes and topics in Beowulf are still as relevant today as they were in the Anglo-Saxon time period. For example, how many boxes would you and your students be able to mark on this Beowulf Bookish Bingo Board? The cousin to literary personality quizzes, a board like this can help spark curiosity and show relevance of classic texts. Learn more about them in this post: 10 Creative Ways to Introduce a Literature Unit and grab your free board to template here:
Secondly, this commenter did push me to make my Beowulf unit more relevant for all students. Due to my experience as a student and then my position as a British Literature teacher, I always told my students that Beowulf was important because it was the first notable work in the English language. The genesis. The archetype. The epic of all epics.
But of course, this English-centric viewpoint is limited, not to mention just plain wrong. While there’s no denying Beowulf is an important first for the English literature, looking at the text from a world lens opened so many exciting new paths to teach Beowulf to high school students!
By putting a world-view lens on Beowulf, I sparked my own curiosity about things like women’s roles in the Anglo-Saxon period and how values are revealed in other stories from around the world.
Here are a couple of the meaningful and engaging Beowulf activities I added to my Beowulf unit.
Though I did not add a project option to my Beowulf unit, for those who prefer projects over essays or want to dig into the world view even further, a fantastic Beowulf project would be to have students research a story from around the world that they are curious about then create a presentation or children’s book that showcases the values that are revealed through that culture’s story.
Here are some resources to get you started on facilitating this Beowulf project:
- Play this hero’s journey overview – The Hero’s Journey and the Monomyth: Crash Course World Mythology #25
- Create a hero story choice board with lots of options from around the word. Though I have not previewed all these stories, here are some places to start:
Videos:
The Epic of Gilgamesh: Crash Course World Mythology #26
Ma’ui, Oceania’s Hero: Crash Course World Mythology #31
The Mwindo Epic: Crash Course World Mythology #29
Podcasts:
The Myths and Legends Podcast not only has some Beowulf episodes, but also offers stories from around the world. Their website is organized by tags, so you can preview Native American stories, Middle East stories, African stories, etc. While I have not listened to all the stories in the tags, I do know that the narrator gives warnings for mature topics. If you want to learn more about how I incorporate podcasts in the classroom, start here: How to plan a podcast unit
I did listen to the Native American Folklore: Monster episode and it was hilarious! It would make a fun pairing for the Grendel section of Beowulf.
- Encourage students to research the story they are most curious about and find multiple tellings, illustrations, and sources for the story. Then, have students make a list of cultural values that are showcased in the story.
- Have students create a presentation for the class or create a children’s book that showcases the values they infer. You can find my storybook assignment here: Create a Storybook: A fun project for any text or any narrative goal!
Adding fun activities to your Beowulf unit
Freedom – In the Freedom Section of Keeping the Wonder: An Educator’s Guide to Magical, Engaging, and Joyful Learning, we talk about the importance of movement and play in the secondary classroom. Since the language of Beowulf is difficult to read for extended periods of time, I make sure to offer plenty of fun activities for teaching Beowulf that break up the challenging text.
For example, students practice tone by standing up and shifting from middle (neutral) to left (negative) to right (positive). Then students close read a single section by three different translators and determine the translator’s tone toward Grendel.
Adding excerpts by the female author, Maria Dahvana Headley and insight from the acclaimed Tony Morrison really enhanced both the depth and diversity of teaching Beowulf. Headley’s writing is playful, modern, and nuanced but it does contain mature language. However, I highly recommend at least playing her reading for the Grendel’s Mother section then using Tony Morrison’s insight about this scene as a talking point.
As I mentioned in the Surprise Section above, another way I incorporated fun activities for teaching Beowulf is through a whole- unit gamification of Beowulf.
At the start of the Beowulf unit, students form into mead-hall groups. The mead-hall in Beowulf is named Heorot and stands for Hall of Heart. We talk about how the mead-hall is a gathering place and represents community. Students add what they want in their mead-hall and give it a creative name.
These mead-hall groups then become hubs for the rest of the Beowulf unit. Either before or after each reading section, I have a little Beowulf themed game for groups to play. For example, before reading the Dragon section of Beowulf, students play Dragon Trivia to activate schema on dragon archetypes.
Dragon Trivia: Which ancient language does the word “dragon” or “draconta” meaning “to watch” come from? (read to the end to check your answer!)
Other games in my Beowulf Unit include tone sorting, Beowulf job interview tournament, naming Grendel’s mother competition, review riddles, etc. These games only take a few minutes but really up the Beowulf buy-in and engagement!
Another cool element of the mead-hall groups is that they can be used for small group discussions. I call these “Mead-hall Meetings”, or “Mead-hall Meanderings” and students gather in their “mead-halls” to chat about discussion questions like this one:
Inspiration for fun activities to teach Beowulf
Inspiration– The last chapter of our book is about inspiration so I would like to end with fun activities for teaching Beowulf that inspired me.
Jewish Superhero History- My historian friend Megan shared a post about the Jewish history of the comic book industry, and it was fascinating! Beowulf lends well to superhero pairings in general but adding the Jewish history really elevates the comparison. A few of the activities in my Beowulf unit plan address the mix of pagan traditions and Christian additions. Coupling those with pairings like this video unpacking the Jewish history of comic books provides a dynamic discussion and insight opportunity.
Epic Names – My coauthor Staci did a fun community building activity in our book study as well as with her students on the first day of school. I thought the style went really well with Beowulf’s boast so I included a fun Anglo-Saxon avatar assignment that prompted students to create their own epic name.
Short Animated Film- My other coauthor Jenna shared about a cool video she found that gives Grendel’s perspective in a creative way. It’s adorable, clever, and surprisingly deep! Use Grendel by BYU Animation to discuss Grendel’s point-of-view or to do a comparison between how Grendel is portrayed in other animated Beowulf films.
I hope this blog post inspired you with engaging ideas for teaching Beowulf! If you want access to all of my meaningful and fun activities for teaching Beowulf, you can find all of my Beowulf teaching resources in this pack: Editable and Engaging Beowulf Unit Plan with Digital Options
Oh, and the answer to the Dragon Trivia question is Greek! 😊
[…] ready to start Beowulf, there’s an ambient sound for that too! Mead Hall Ambience, who knew!? As I know from […]