Now Hear This!

Last week, our reading lessons had to do with reading aloud.  Readers' Theater is a fun and effective way to work on fluency.  On Monday, students were assigned one of four scripts, the parts assigned to best match students' needs.  However, I must point out that in every script, there are smaller and larger parts.  While the students with the smaller parts were able to commit most (or all their lines) to memory, everybody followed their fellow readers' lines.  The ability to read along as others read aloud is also valuable!

The scripts included: The Three Wishes, traditional; Red Riding Hood, retold by Jomes Marshall, adapted by Chris Murphy; The Fourth Little Pig, by Teresa Celsi, adapted by Bonnie Walters; and The Frog Prince, Continued, retold by Jon Scieska, adapted by Merrilee Betts.  These were all traditional fairy tales, or spin-offs of traditional tales.  For instance, in The Fourth Little Pig, it is the fourth pig, the sister pig, who huffs, and puffs, and blows down the house!

Students practiced their lines in groups with me and with pairs or trios within each group during reading time every day.  Students worked on vocabulary words such as custard, immensely, profession, and black pudding so we could understand the sometimes less-familiar words from the traditional tales.  We also worked on character development so the narrators sounded more like story-tellers, the grandmother could sound more angry at having her reading interrupted, and the wizards could sound more conniving.  Though we were restricted to a week of preparation time on these scripts, we were able to touch on some stage direction, too.  Turning to face away from or toward the audience or away makes a reading more understandable to the listeners.

Mostly, however we worked on fluency.  Also called prosody, fluency is reading with flow that matches the task.  For instance, you read a letter from Grandma differently than you read a thrilling mystery novel, which is also read differently than instructions on using your new dremel tool!  Reading these scripts with a flow that matched their character and the story was important for conveying the meaning of the story to the audience.  It was fun to listen to the prince ask the wizards to help turn him into a frog when he sounded more needy than if the words rushed out.  It sounded more suspenseful to hear the woodcutter wish he had a black pudding right that instance rather than waiting for an hour for his dinner (knowing that he had just used the word, "wish")!

Fluent reading is more than just reading quickly.  Few of us would like to hear everything read like the "fine print" speakers at the ends of commercials.  We want to be entranced in the story!  The students did a great job over just one week learning to read fluently their traditional and spin-off fairy tale scripts!  Bravo!