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What this is. A stand-alone unit on Macbeth. Students learn the story of the play through ten short scenes, and collect a few famous lines along the way. Nothing here depends on any other Shakespeare unit, so it can be taught first, second, or alone.

Where it is now. All ten scenes are ready to play, from Three Strange Sisters to The Forest Walks. Every scene goes guess, game, lesson, quiz, review video, card pack. The video comes after the quiz so it brings the scene together at the end. A student who misses a quiz watches the video before trying again, and does not have to watch it twice. The teacher code for this page works on every scene page too.

One scene at a time. Scenes open in order. Scene 1 is open from the start, and each scene after that opens when the one before it is finished. This is checked on the story page and on each scene page, so typing a scene's address does not skip ahead. A save code opens the scenes it holds. With the teacher code entered on a computer, every scene is open there.

The finale. "The Trial of Macbeth" (mactrial.html) opens on the Story tab once a student has finished all ten scenes. The actors come back on stage, King Malcolm leads a trial, and the student is the judge: a first hunch, an evidence game, four witnesses, the student's own written verdict with two pieces of evidence, a final test on the whole play, and a last card pack. Finishing it gives the top rank, Royal Judge. Verdicts are saved on that computer only and are not graded. They make a good class discussion: group students by verdict and let each side make its case. A finished trial is part of the save code, so it comes back with the scenes. The written verdict does not.

His Own Words. A bonus tab, locked until a student has finished all ten scenes on that computer (with the teacher code entered it is open). It plays the whole play again in ten parts, about forty five minutes, on the same stages with the same characters, but every line spoken is from Shakespeare, about 3,700 words. The lines were taken one by one from the Project Gutenberg text and checked word for word. They were cut and never rewritten, apart from tidying punctuation where a cut was made. The lines are read slowly in British voices, a woman's voice for the women and a man's for the men. It loads each scene page inside this page, so it only works on the website itself, with all ten scene files in the same folder as this page.

What was left out of His Own Words. Every line that names blood, murder or killing, the drunk porter's longer speeches, Lady Macbeth's two harshest speeches, the cauldron's ingredients, the hired men's talk with Macbeth about Banquo, the account of the attack on Macduff's family beyond Ross's few words, Macduff's words about his birth, and the last lines of the play. The story still runs from start to finish without them.

The Thane's Journal. A printable journal goes with the unit: one big question for each scene, with room to write, and a page for the trial verdict. Use it for discussion, a warm up, or an exit ticket.

Save codes. Progress is saved in the browser, so a reset or a different computer would wipe it. Each time a student finishes a scene, the last screen shows an 8 digit save code, and the same code is on this page under "Your save code". Typing that code into this page on any computer marks those scenes finished and puts their card packs back in the Card Trunk. The code only knows which scenes are finished. A student who stops halfway through a scene starts that one scene again. Hidden picture secrets are not in the code, since finding them again takes a minute. Codes are not tied to a student, so one student could share a code with another.

How the dark parts are handled. Macbeth is a story about murder, so this unit tells it for children. The killings happen offstage and are told, never shown. The harshest lines are left out. The witches and the ghost are spooky, not gory, and the story keeps its point: what happens to a person who wants something so much that they stop thinking.

The picture. A stormy Scottish wasteland at dusk. Five things in it hide a card: the lightning, the raven (Corbie, the guide), the three sisters at the cauldron, the golden crown, and the castle. Nothing in the picture is needed to move on, so students who skip it lose nothing.

Test tools. These change saved progress on this computer only. Use them to preview the ranks and the bar.