A pilot program has brought Shakespeare to primary students

LUCY Clare might be only nine years old and in Year 4 at school but she already knows her favourite Shakespeare play.

Bell Shakespeare

LUCY Clare might be only nine years old and in Year 4 at school but she already knows her favourite Shakespeare play.

"Romeo and Juliet. It's a classic!" she cries, without hesitation. " I love his plays: some of them are funny, some of them are sad."

Her schoolmate Lucas Novel, 10, nominates Hamlet as the best. Their classmates at the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Primary School in Mosman, on Sydney's north shore, can reel off a list of Shakespeare's plays, and ideas on what it was like to sit in the Globe Theatre and how Shakespeare acted in his own plays.

The students were involved in a pilot program by the Bell Shakespeare company to break the Bard's bad reputation among high school students by introducing Shakespeare to primary school students.

After working with high school students and their teachers for the past 20 years or so, Bell Shakespeare has been trialling a primary school program for students over the past couple of years in about 50 schools, with students of varied backgrounds.

From September, the company will tour city and regional schools across NSW, Victoria and the ACT. The company hopes to take the program nationally by 2015.

Bell Shakespeare's head of education, Joanna Erskine, said the company had been performing an adapted version of A Midsummer's Night Dream over the past two years in primary schools to a "rapturous response".

"We knew we were on to something. We realised the power and potential (of working in primary schools) and realised maybe we were thinking about it the wrong way round," she said.

"For years, we've been working with secondary school students, where by Years 9 or 10 kids hate Shakespeare. They have negative preconceptions of him, have been told he's boring or too hard and doesn't mean anything to them.

"Usually it's from brothers and sisters, or even parents, who've passed down negative reactions.

"But we thought what if we work with kids when they're young, before they have negative preconceptions, what if we introduce them to Shakespeare's stories in primary schools when they don't have a lot of walls up against the world?"

When teacher Paula Stefanatos is asked "Why teach Shakespeare to primary school students?", she answers: "Why not?"

"It should be taught at primary level, it's where it should start, because you approach it in a fun way and you can let the stories make it engaging," she said.

"They get to appreciate the stories and the characters.

"Primary teachers are also daunted by teaching Shakespeare - not because they're not capable of doing it, but because they're not trained to teach him."