As I have discussed previously, the “secret” to reader’s theater success as a reading strategy is that it gets students reading—and rereading—willingly.
At Benchmark Education Company, we advocate for a five-day lesson plan with Reader’s Theater. Using one Reader’s Theater script during the daily literacy block over the course of a week gives students multiple opportunities to read and reread the same material, with a specific purpose. These multiple reading opportunities can, and should, take different approaches, which helps keep the students engaged and focused, while effectively developing their reading fluency.
For the next few entries, I will discuss five different reading strategies:
- Day One—Model-Read
- Day Two—Echo-Read
- Day Three—Choral-Read
- Day Four—Repeated-Read
- Day Five—Performance/Staged Reading
Day One—Model Read
The teacher reads aloud the complete script, giving life, inflection, dramatic expression, etc., to each character part. Students listen and read along silently. Alternatively, the teacher can display the script on a whiteboard and play an audio recording of the script as performed by professional actors. Note the text highlighting feature on the sample below:
More Reader’s Theater Resources:
Why do we teach phonics? Most teachers will answer “for decoding purposes,” “for children to learn sound/symbol relationships,” “It is the foundation for reading,” etc. While these reasons may be accurate, the main reason we teach phonics is so that students are automatic with the orthographic processing system. The ultimate goal is for students to transfer this knowledge to reading and writing so that comprehension and fluency are maintained. It is important to remember that skilled readers automatically and quickly recognize words they read. When proficient readers try to unlock unfamiliar words, they try some quick problem-solving strategies based on their understanding of language and their knowledge of sound/symbol relationships and how words work. They can pick and use these strategies quickly because they have practiced them many times and can be flexible as they encounter unfamiliar words.
As soon as students have acquired some strategies for comparing letters, these strategies can be used to analyze the visual features of words. At the direction of the brain, the eyes search the word for distinguishable features—or known parts—which may or may not be associated with the entire word. Instead of searching for individual letter/sound categories (which is a slow process), the brain searches among its collection of logical word parts that can be used to problem-solve the unknown word. For example, if the unknown word is “stack,” and the brain has a category for words that start like “stop” and another category for words that end with “ack,” the brain integrates the visual information from these two known categories and responds with an appropriate choice for the unknown word. Searching five letter categories (s-t-a-c-k) individually is a much slower response. In Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control (1991), Clay describes how “letter analysis is slow, requires more learning, allows for more error and is more difficult to re-instate as a word.” Rather, children need to notice larger chunks of information: “the larger the pronounceable units a child can discover and use, the less learning effort will be required.”
Watch the following video. Sandra the teacher encourages her Kindergarten classroom to learn consonant and short vowels at an automatic level by making sure that they know the following:
- The name of the letter
- The sound of the letter
- A word that starts with the letter
- How to write the letter
Video: Sound/Symbol Relationship
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Reading and re-reading are necessary steps to improve fluency and comprehension, however, it can be challenging to find innovative, authentic ways to encourage students to read the same work over and over again.
As many of you know from experience, Reader’s Theater asks students to reproduce written work using voice alone (no props, sets, and costumes), providing a legitimate rationale for re-reading. In the process of using the scripts and performing, students demonstrate marked gains in literacy including, but not limited to, a more complete understanding of how to read expressively by achieving the right volume, pitch, tone and timing.
A interesting study by Sheri Vasinda and Julie McLeod (conducted and published earlier this year in The Reading Teacher) points out that by thoughtfully pairing technologies with literacy strategies, teachers can reinvent and reinforce tried and true classroom techniques like Reader’s Theater.
In their study, Vasinda and McLeod seek to incorporate 21st century technology – in the form of podcasts – to further enhance the impact of the Reader’s Theater experience. The study followed six classes (100 students in total) for 10 weeks. Each week, the students chose a new script to practice and perform by week’s end, then recorded the scripts on existing classroom computers using external microphones and free software (about $10 worth of technology).
Even though technology can occasionally detract or complicate the goals of a classroom, the findings from this study demonstrate that the use of podcasting actually complements and reinforces the benefits of Reader’s Theater. The results show that in this case technology offers students:
- A wider audience for their work, further reinforcing the significance of the overall exercise
- A more permanent illustration of their work, allowing for review and self-evaluation to make changes for the next time
- An inexpensive and easy way of capturing the student voice, while maintaining the integrity of the Reader’s Theater experience
- A relatively concealed method for the students to express themselves anonymously, allowing the students to read and be in character without feeling overly self-conscious
Have you ever captured a Reader’s Theater performance either aurally or on video? If so, please share your experiences… we would love to hear (and learn) from you!
It’s one thing to be able to read clearly, persuasively, and with feeling, but it’s quite another to write that way. We all know that reading well (and often) typically makes someone a better writer, but now there is quite a bit of research to show that the converse is also true. Writing ability also improves reading ability.
Yet two big debates swirl around writing in the classroom:
- What should kids write about?
- How should teachers evaluate them?
Today, we are going to discuss the former. When focusing on writing in the classroom, there are so many different genres that students can tackle (everything from biography to memo writing to fairy tale), and each genre has its own application and importance in daily life, which creates a challenge for teachers and directors of curriculum.
Unfortunately success in one genre does not predict success in another. Some people can easily crank out a memo in 10 minutes flat, but if you asked them to write a poetic ode to their children’s spirited natures, they might be hamstrung on even where to begin.
It seems self-evident then to say that exposure to many different types of writing is necessary to improve fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary, and, therefore, that all classrooms should cover a variety of written work in their language arts curriculum.
So why don’t they? Time? Budget? Lack of materials? Probably all of the above.
It takes effort for a student to become adept in writing in any genre, but the first step is that each student needs to be able to recognize a genre and describe its main characteristics (e.g., what is expository writing?).
Second, he or she needs to gain practice in working within the genre (in our example of expository writing, perhaps writing one’s own magazine article, instructional manual, or newsletter).
Third, he or she needs to be evaluated by the teacher (a conversation that we will leave for another day) and then edit and practice some more.
Benchmark Education’s award-winning Readers’ & Writers’ Genre Workshop series can help with ALL of these steps, not only facilitating each student’s writing engagement but also encouraging active and diverse written assignments.
We’d love to hear from you about how you successfully engage your students in writing and what challenges you face. What strategies do you use? Have you used genre workshops in your classroom? If so, how have they worked for you?
In 2009, Kelly Gallagher (a veteran teacher from Anaheim, CA) wrote a book called Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It.
Mr. Gallagher asserts that students today grow up in print-poor environments, surrounded by electronic gadgets and overwhelmed with extracurricular (nonreading) activities. There are a huge number of pressures that divert our children from reading today, including (very acceptable) ones like having to hold a job, struggling with English as a second language, or caring for siblings after school.
And then there are the TESTS that teach kids to read quickly and hunt for certain details, but suck all the joy out of reading.
His recommendations for today’s classroom include but are not limited to:
- Interspersing books kids love with the classics
- Encouraging kids to read work that is relevant and has context in their lives
- Providing books that kids can handle (based on their aptitude, not their grade level)
- Challenging kids to read more critically
- Inviting teachers to “do less and do it better” and provide “richer, deeper instruction”
- Asking teachers to consciously put aside district standards for the best interest of the kids
It seems two years later, not much has changed. Both the problem and the proposed solutions still hold. If anything, Mr. Gallagher’s premise in 2009 appears even stronger today. It’s hard to walk down any Main Street without seeing teenagers hooked up to iPods, cell phones, or portable game consoles. And any Main Street intersection surely includes at least one car driven by a parent rushing to the next soccer game or karate class or music lesson. We mean no disrespect to any of these activities, which all have profound value in our children’s lives, but we propose everything in moderation and surely not at the expense of reading.
How can we find the balance and go back to a culture that promotes and sustains life-long readers? Any ideas?
For a recent interview with Kelly Gallagher in Education Week, click here.
The experience of reading a book is exactly that – an experience. It evokes different feelings when read privately than when read aloud, when discussed in a book club, or when seen in movie form. Inevitably, the reader takes away something different when it’s oral vs. visual or individual vs. group. The reader’s mind is challenged in different ways as the characters may look different, sound different, and be interpreted differently.
At Benchmark Education, we have found that Reader’s Theater is a very successful model for teaching literacy in an oral group setting. By definition, Reader’s Theater is the reading of a text with others in front of an audience. The text can come from any form of literature: poetry, fiction, script, or any other literary work, or be an original piece that explores history, science, and even math concepts in an engaging way. But what’s important is that the reading is straight forward yet dramatic:
1) By “straight forward,” we mean there are little to no special effects, staging, scenery, costumes, music, or (importantly) memorizing of lines.
2) By “dramatic,” we mean that children need to interpret the characters by using their voices to bring them to life and show how the characters feel, who they are, and how they fit in with the story.
This is not the school play; it’s reading to learn. And when used well, Reader’s Theater can positively impact readers’ fluency, comprehension, interest, and confidence.
Throughout the arc of this blog, we will discuss Reader’s Theater extensively – why and how is it used, and how we (and ultimately you) can make it successful. We will offer tips and strategies on how to incorporate Reader’s Theater into the classroom and explore what other educators are doing.
So starting today, let’s talk about some of the basics of performing a reader’s theater script: staging and scenery.
Staging
We already mentioned that you don’t need a formal stage to perform a reader’s theater script with your students; in fact, it’s not recommended. Instead, you just need to make some space in your classroom or “go on tour” to a multipurpose room, the library, the school lobby, or even outdoors. Ask students to look either at the audience (pretend or real) or at other characters (i.e., students) while reading their parts. And experiment with the following techniques to see which one works best for your classroom. Have students onstage:
- Remain seated on chairs or stools in a line or semicircle
- Place their scripts on music stands and stand behind them
- Stand throughout the entire performance
- Stand only when they read their parts
- Stand in a line and step forward when they read their parts
- Stand with their backs to the audience and turn around when they read their parts
- Move onstage and offstage for their parts
Scenery
Scenery can be as simple as a sheet or a large piece of fabric taped to the wall or as complicated as backdrops and murals made by the students themselves. However, the former is recommended so as not to distract the audience or other characters. In traditional reader’s theater, a single spotlight illuminates a dark, plain stage while readers wearing dark outfits sit on stools. Such staging allows the audience to create their own images rather than see literally the actors in their roles.
Have you personally ever used Reader’s Theater in your classroom? If so, what have you found are the challenges? How have you staged it and incorporated scenery, if at all?
More Reader”s Theater Resources:
