So, I said I don't like Shakespearean insult lessons. Here's what I do instead…

Year 7, spring 2, an introduction to Shakespeare heroes and villains. Great. Some lessons on the shared area to adapt for your group. Perfect. Lesson 1, Shakespearean insults. Absolutely not.

At my school, year 7s are taught in their form groups for English: mixed ability and I have an interesting group. They are great and full of life, but getting them focussed and working hard can be a challenge, especially just after lunch. Guess when I have them for lesson 1. So, for a laugh I decided to tweet to my 13 followers. Little did I know the wonderful Jennifer Webb was going to comment and draw a load of attention to my stupid exaggeration.

I've taught my fair share of Shakespearean insult lessons, I've even enjoyed it a few times, but I have always felt that I struggled to get them to move from shouting "thou art nought but an artless elf skinned flap dragon" to actually feeling that they can break down an extract of Shakespeare, namely the introduction of Tybalt (lesson 3). More than likely, this is a key hinge that I have missed and the number of teachers who replied to my tweet might have keyed on something I have missed, but it's never worked for me.

I decided that I wasn't going to do the insults lesson and started to think what my class needed.

I have some very talented readers in my class and I have some that find reading a real challenge, let alone the basically foreign language of the Bard. What they need is a strategy to use when they come across a word they don't know. They need to feel like they can find a way to understand when the word is unrecognisable and they don't just need this in English, they need it across the curriculum. A plan is forming linked to lesson 2 - Shakespeare's Globe.

So, in they trot from lunch all hot and bothered from football or the drama of the day. Five minutes of silent reading later and we are ready to learn.

To start, I ask them to write down there things that makes them worried about Shakespeare.

Responses include "what if I can't read the words?" "What if I can't understand the story?' "What if I get bad marks because I can't read it properly?"

We whisk away from this to the visualiser where I have written "diachronic variation"

"Hands up question, what does that mean?" I pose. Furrowed browns and confused looks abound. "I think a better question is how can we work it out? Any ideas?"

Eventually we get the idea to break it down. "Who can think of any words that start with dia?"

We collect: dialogue, diagram and diameter. We talk about how a diagram is what we would see if we look through an experiment, a dialogue is talking between two people and a diameter is a line through a circle. We figure out dia means through. 

Chron was a bit easier when I reminded them of our previous myths and legends unit and they remembered the titan Chronos in Greek myth was father time. We got variation through various and varied.

This was our strategy and we had a worked example of breaking a word down to prefix, suffix and root by linking to other words we knew.

We then switched to watching the introduction to the RSC's Romeo and Juliet with shots of the Globe and the audience and we discuss what it looks like, what it would be link to be there with some sensory adjectives. Then, we hinge to thinking how it would have been different 400 years ago.

We read a short paragraph about the globe with challenging vocabulary, one of which was cutpurse.

This was where the magic happened. I pounced on one student who immediately said she didn't know (a classic behaviour in my school), but when she applied our strategy she knew cut and purse and took a guess. "Is is someone who cuts someone's purse or wallet, Sir?" 

"In the Elizabethan era, people carried their purses tied into their belts, why would they cut them?

"To steal them?"

Her face when I said she was right was a picture. She had proved herself wrong and she could do it. Would she have had that from telling her friend they were a surly beef-witted flirt gill? I'm not convinced.

I'm not saying we should outlaw the insults lesson, I'm saying it's not for me. A strategy translates more clearly than an experience and when we looked at Tybalt's introduction the class were able to translate into modern English with just a few clues on the whiteboard. I even caught some of them starting to do it independently in our library lesson.

So, do I think no student has ever learned anything from a Shakespearian insults lesson? No, of course not. I was being dramatic, but is it the best way to introduce Shakespeare to students who are nervous about it?