Kids love to put on plays. Reader’s theatre is a wonderful technique to make books come alive and to have students bring books to life. According to the article, Taking It to the Stage With Readers Theater (the article is from School Library Journal, hence the American spelling!), readers theatre helps students to become more aware of the nuances of plot and language. When a student works with a text as an actor, he or she becomes more intimately involved with it and can see how the way a sentence is read can change the meaning completely. This is a fantastic how-to for getting readers theatre going in your schools, s
o share it with teachers.
On a personal note, I was horrified to read a Tweet by School Library Journal, that a principal nixed readers theatre because it doesn’t involve technology. How shortsighted! Technology is one tool to engage students; readers theatre is another. Why would we ignore effective means of getting our students to enjoy the books they work with because it doesn’t have a screen? Hard to believe, isn’t it?
