Reader’s Theater and the Struggling Reader
As a reading specialist, I am fortunate to have worked with many wonderful and bright children who, despite best efforts in the classroom, hit a ceiling with their reading abilities from time to time. After learning to decode and read somewhat fluently, there were still times where all of that hard work seemed to just go out the window. Some students were experiencing difficulties with attention, others were experiencing boredom and burnout. Regardless of the reason, discovering Reader’s Theater seemed to be the answer I had long been searching for.
Reader’s theater is a strategy where students read aloud and perform using scripts adapted from grade-level fictional text. Originally, this intervention was created to help students work on fluency through “acting out” scripts read aloud. Recently, I used a reader’s theater version of The Three Little Pigs to engage a student who has difficulty staying focused with most academic activities, especially reading. I found the script on the Have Fun Teaching.com website. This student went from dreading literacy blocks to asking for more and more Reader’s Theater activities.
While reader’s theater is a fun way to help students develop fluency, you can tie in other reading goals as well. I used the script to work on reading comprehension, specifically cause and effect and some thinking beyond the text. This is great for my students with good decoding skills, but struggling with comprehension. In the “Three Little Pigs” example, we were able to use Reader’s Theater to talk about how the first two “little pigs” were destined to fail using the “scene” of the straw house and stick house. This student, who previously had difficulty making connections and inferences, independently made the connection that straw and sticks were not as strong as bricks. For even more fun, the script came with some printable mask templates and my student was able to choose a mask to make and act out his character as “the wolf.” This added visual really helped him get into character and helped him to think further about the character of the wolf and how he was feeling during the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
