Readers Theatre
Hello again! I want to share with you the
activity which we had developed today in the seminar with Raquel.
Readers theatre is a joint dramatic reading from a text.It consists on make a vocal representation of a text with different characters. The actors not have to memorize the text, and they do not have to do any movement, only read it and use vocal expression to make it more striking and intense, moreover to help the audience to understand the story.
Readers theatre is a joint dramatic reading from a text.It consists on make a vocal representation of a text with different characters. The actors not have to memorize the text, and they do not have to do any movement, only read it and use vocal expression to make it more striking and intense, moreover to help the audience to understand the story.
There are
so many good reasons for using this method in classrooms with children:
1. To reinforce reading ability.
2. To reinforce vocabulary by using
words in context.
3. To improve the intonation and the
pronunciation.
4. To improve the cooperative work.
5. It can include SEN integration because there are many
roles available.
6. To improve the confidence.
7. It’s a strategy for developing reading fluency.
We had
been practicing among the classmates and it was a great experience in which we
can really involve in the context. We had started with a text of first cycle of
primary education and each of us had one character. First we had to read it
carefully and underlain the words which we consider important to emphasize them.
Then, Raquel gave us another text, very similar but with more information and
we did the same with it. At the end of the class what most surprise to me is
that we had memorized the contents without realizing. What was more difficult
for me was to look to the audience sometimes, because I was losing the text,
but with two times practicing it was perfect!
Here I leave
you a web page in which you can found a lot of different stories to make roles
with your students moreover you can take ideas of how to use this method.
And finally these are two amazing examples for me of
children doing readers theater:
I'm so proud of you, María! Your learning progress is amazing, and you're doing a great work in my subject. I'm happy to see that you liked the readers' theatre idea. I think it is full with possiblities. You can tell students to include movements if they want, but it is not necessary. Thank you for the videos, they are really illustrative of what we saw in class ;-).
ResponderEliminarThank you very much Raquel!'m very glad with your words! I'm working hard.
EliminarMoreover, the blog has been an activity that I found very interesting to collect the activities we have done in class and I use them as a resource for the future.Thank you again for your comment!
Hello María!
ResponderEliminarYour post is very informative and useful; I have perfectly learnt what does a reader´s theatre is, the things that this method has below and how it works from your experience. I have put into practice the reader´s theatre in the seminar too, so I will tell you how it worked and I hope that my experience and reflections will help you.
If you focus your attention in the process, you will perceive a big difference between the first time you read it and the final one. That is because the first time we read it, we used the same intonation and there was monotonous and boring; we sometimes made mistakes in the pronunciation of the words and we could be a bit nervous because everybody was listening to us. But the following times we have been working in these things; accordingly, we have learnt to intonate emphasizing the most important words; read slowly taking into account the stops, full stops and comas; how to pronounce some words that we didn’t know and made as do not feel confident; and finally we have rehearse two or three times in silence and we have read it aloud. It was great because the execution was perfect.
In conclusion, before make the children execute a task we have to guide them through the following steps: first, read the text; second, ask for the meaning and the pronunciation of the words that you do not know; third, highline the most important words; fourth, read the text for your own taking into account all this things and emphasizing the important words; fifth, rehearse it almost two or three times; and sixth, read it aloud. All I have mentioned before are very important things that we can use in the reader´s theatre but also in order to read, understand what we have read and communicate to other people.
There are many things that we can work through the reader´s theatre and I am sure I will use this tool in the future.
Clara V.