Project Based Learning
With Reader's Theater
and Community Outreach
Project Based Learning is a new highly recommended trend in 21st Century Community Learning Centers and other After School programs, designed to help students "learn by doing." Projects are usually designed to help students develop their communication, collaboration, and critical thinking skills in authentic activities, often through community involvement.
You can help your students gain valuable real life skills by directing a project in which students reach out to families with younger children (of reading age) in local neighborhoods to work on literacy and encourage parent reading involvement. Your After School students can work in an big brothers/big sisters sort of arrangement to do reader's theater with kids and their parents over a 1-2 week span (or longer if time allows), and plan a reader's theater performance at the end of the period to showcase the project!
First, familiarize your students with reader's theater and expressive reading and have them read one or more scripts at their own content and reading level. Next, meet with the participating families and let your students introduce what they already learned about reader's theater to the younger children, and have them also perform fun acting demonstrations. Then, your students can come together to form small groups with the families and take part in a reader's theater script together.
The content chosen for this activity should be of a level appropriate to the younger children, but multi-leveled scripts allow everyone to read at his or her own ability level so the reading practice remains valuable for students of all ages. Playbooks® multi-story kits come with the tools you need to easily assign roles based on age and/or any knowledge you may have of the students' reading skills. With younger students taking easier roles and older students and parents taking more difficult roles in the same script, the younger readers are exposed to richer vocabulary than they would be able to read on their own. If parents are non-fluent in English, they can also take easier roles.
After conducting as many sessions as your program wishes, (it's best to try to read each script 3 times if possible to meet the recommendations of Repeated Guided Oral Reading), your students and their "little brothers and sisters" will be ready to perform the story for an invited audience and show off their accomplishments! With this project, your students will benefit from the experience of teaching younger kids and will help make a difference in their communities, while all that are involved build read-aloud confidence!
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Literacy Instruction For Boys:
Give Them the Books They Want to Read!
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The issue of engaging boys in reading is gaining attention in recent years, as more and more statistics show that boys consistently score lower than girls in language arts on standardized tests. Boys also display less interest in reading at school and often consider themselves non-readers at home. |
Clearly, boys can and do learn to love and succeed at reading, but typically they need the right kind of instruction and opportunities to do so, especially as they enter middle school!
Boys typically enjoy:
- Books that address their goals and activities they are interested in, often sports, science, etc.
- Books that are humorous, mischievous,
and make them laugh
- Books that contain a lot of action
- Books in the science fiction or fantasy categories
- Reading activities that are social
- Reading activities that allow active participation and instruction rather than quiet study
Reader's theater offers an active, social reading experience that often results in infectious laughter, making it an ideal strategy for helping bring out boys' enthusiasm. Reader's theater also helps students to be able to visually see the story unfold, another aspect that tends to increase boys' interest and comprehension. Furthermore, theater arts let boys explore emotion in a way that feels safe and acceptable, leading to more enjoyment of the activity. Scripts are available in a wide array of genres that will appeal to male students.
Playbooks® Reader's Theater stories are carefully crafted to appeal to students with content and lessons they can easily relate to, and humor is always included to help put readers at ease with their peers and reach their expressive reading potential. Scripts are balanced for small groups so everyone gets to read regularly throughout the story, making the most of the social aspect of reader's theater.
Add these Playbooks® with boy-friendly themes to your curriculum:
The Great Rhyme Travel Machine III: Saving
Planet Earth (Ecological Science, Gr. 3-6)
My Wide World of Sports (Sports and Fitness, Gr. 3-6)
The Baseball Equation (Math and Sports, Gr. 4-6)
How Sandy Got Her Spin (Sports and Goals, Gr. 4-7)
Planet Parade (Space Science, Gr. 4-7)
Who Gives a Hoot (Nature Science, Gr. 4-8)
Soccer Stars (Sports, Jealousy, and Forgiveness,
Gr. 4-9)
Surfing at Sunrise (Sports Practice and Competition,
Gr. 6-9)
Mission Humanity (Science Fiction, Gr. 6-12)
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