Reading Idol! Bringing Readers Theatre Center Stage in Your Classroom

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Students have an opportunity to create an outstanding Readers Theatre performance within groups to compete for the title of Reading Idol. Students are given scripts to practice their roles within Readers Theatre. Throughout the week, groups practice repeatedly until the performance day. On the performance day, students take turns performing and evaluating their own work and the performances of other groups before voting on a winning performance. All groups are required to create a podcast of their performance. The Reading Idol winners are also recorded by video and uploaded to the teacher’s website for others to view.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

• Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch script:
  This script for Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch can be copied into a Word document and then adapted to fit your classroom needs.

• Reader’s Theater Student Self-Assessment:
  The Reader’s Theater Student Self-Assessment rubric provides each student with guidelines for self-assessment.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Young, C., & Rasinski, T. (2009). Implementing Readers Theatre as an approach to classroom fluency instruction. The Reading Teacher, 63(1), 4–13.

• The use of authentic literature in the form of Readers Theatre can offer students a wide range of texts for repeated readings.
  
  
• The use of an authentic performance goal gets students excited about practicing and gives them a true sense of accomplishment after the final performance.
  
  
• The use of technology as a way to share performances gives students the motivation to create the best Readers Theatre performance they can since they know others will watch their final performance.
  
  
• The use of Readers Theatre as a way to develop automaticity, accuracy, and prosody allows students to increase fluency without even realizing they are participating in repeated readings!
  
  
• Readers Theatre can be incorporated into guided reading groups or workstations.

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