Aaron Shephard's Reader's Theatre Homepage
I
wanted to share this great resource I found last year for reader’s theatre. Aaron Shephard has a fabulous website with
all kinds of reader’s theatre scripts, tips, and activities. He even has it organized so that if you want
to search by genre, location, and activity type. He has fairy tales, folk tales (from several
countries), and original scripts. There
is a parents’ page, a resource page, and also links to his three books, Stories on Stage, Readers on Stage, and Folktales
on Stage. It seems like even if you
don’t buy the books, it is a wealth of resources to get anyone started. He even has a video of himself reading a
story dramatically. He has some great
facial expressions!
I love
reader’s theatre, because it helps students to experience the story first
hand. I had never really heard of it
before last year and had definitely never done it before, and I am excited to
try it out. Hmmm... I suppose though, it’s
similar to what I do with the Director’s Skit (see Sept 20 post), but I like
that there is already a script. It has a
different purpose than improv. It would
be good for doing as a whole class, splitting everyone up into groups, or
assigning to students who are finished their work. It would also be a great addition to a TTOC’s
bag of tricks. I would like to try
integrating it into other subjects as well.
For example, in a grade six class studying world cultures, I would split
the class into different groups and assign a folk tale from each of the
countries we are studying. They would
practice and perform them for the class.
It could be a great hook for the year, and also a nice wrap up activity
at the end of the year.
It is important to be engaging when reading. I've never done readers theatre, but I think some of his stories could be done with most of a class. Oh, and I agree, fantastic facial expressions.
ReplyDeleteThis looks like a great resource. I am so happy that we live in a day and age that we can find resources online and have all this expertise available to us without having a million books and videos in our personal libraries.
ReplyDeleteNo end of resources online! The catch is, to find the good ones, which is possible with recommendations from colleagues, and to connect what is valuable in them to our local PLOs. Finally, we have to be able to build them into our own lessons so that there is a developmental sequence - the lessons are not isolated experiences but part of an overall movement, in a unit or across the school year, toward increased student engagement and competence with important learning. I love Reader's Theatre, too, and see it as a most powerful arts integration tool to increase reading engagement. I have seen some boring scripts, though, and so I am careful to choose or create ones that don't ruin the strategy for kids. Too bad we didn't get time for the Reader's Theatre lesson before our class was done. I will be sure to work it in earlier next year!
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