It’s magic.
It instantly engages students. They are fully immersed in the text. They are acting it out; they are living it. They become the characters as they portray them.
It makes learning social.
It leads to the kind of discussion and outloud thinking that supports comprehension in the moment and builds good reading-and-thinking habits for future, independent reading.
It has built-in, completely organic and student-driven differentiation. Students select their roles. The competent, confident readers generally take on the parts with more speaking. Those who are not as strong with reading out loud will choose the smaller parts.
Everyone gets practice. Increases fluency for all.
Bonus: Those who struggle the most will benefit from hearing the words spoken aloud as they follow along. This helps them internalize things like intonation and phrasing. Students learn how to “scoop up” meaning: sentence-wise and phrase-wise.
And this: students love it.
What is Reader’s Theater?
Reader’s Theater, first developed for the classroom in the 1950’s, is a reading activity where students read aloud scripts adapted from a narrative text. Students are seated. They are instruted to “act from the waist up” which means they will use voice and intonation along with facial expressions and body language to convey meaning and emotion.
While reader’s theater traditionally involves a group of students who have assigned parts sitting on stools or chairs in the front of the room, performing for the rest of the class, I have found it works best in small groups. If you walk into my classroom during reader’s theater, you will find several small group performances happening at different tables all around the room.
I prefer to approach it this way because it means every student gets to read at least one part. Also, shy kids feel more at ease participating in a small group. And, I have found that if they work like this, they will often stop and talk about what’s happening–spontaneous collaborative discussion!
How do I set up reader’s theater in my classroom?
- You will need a digital copy of the text that you have editing access to. I find it usually works just fine to copy and paste a pdf onto a google doc. (Just make sure the work is in the public domain. Just about anything on commonlit falls into this category.)
- You will edit the text, turning every sentence and paragraph into a script. You will assign all exposition–anything a character isn’t actually saying out loud–to a narrator.
To ease the burden of this part, I generally have 2-3 narrators per script. (Bonus! This helps with comprehension by breaking up long exposition and description passages.)
- You will change every line of dialogue to a script, deleting phrases like “(character name) said” and all quotation marks. You will put stage direction in parentheses.
For example:
(original text)
Martha sighed. “What in the world is wrong with you, Mortimer?”
Mortus wiggled in his seat. He said, almost too quietly for anyone to hear, “Wouldn’t I like to know.”
(reader’s theater script)
Martha (sighing): What in the world is wrong with you, Mortimer?
narrator 1: Mortimer wiggled in his seat.
Mortimer (very quietly): Wouldn’t I like to know.
4. Create a parts page. Here’s an example, from Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter”. I have these set out on the tables, along with the scripts, when students first enter the classroom. They begin by parceling out the parts.
If they are taking a bit too long with this step, I will help them settle their decisions. It’s important to have the scripts available to students so they can see how much talking they will be doing for each part. I have found that students generally self-differentiate here: Strong readers will pick meatier parts. Struggling readers will choose a part with fewer lines.
5. Project directions. (If this is your class’s first time performing Reader’s Theater, it might be useful to discuss these steps and to possibly have a few students model them for the class.)
6. Students begin reading! During this time, I walk around the room, making sure students are following along on the script as others read. I also will try to make sure everyone can hear everyone within their groups. Sometimes, I have to encourage students to speak up, or–if the entire classroom is too loud–I will let a group of students that I can trust to work on their own slip out into the hallway.
This is students’ first time reading the story. I want them to experience it “in real time” and with each other. Students will often, unprompted, engage in the very kind of discussion/thinking you’re wanting them to: predicting, making inferences, analyzing character motivation, and offering their opinions on the different characters’ decisions.
Follow-up: Next Steps
Reader’s Theater is a student’s first step into a literary text. I follow this up with independent reading and annotating, with analysis.
In my classroom, Reader’s Theater is a scaffold, supplying students with a first glimpse of a story. During Reader’s Theater, I am looking for “hooking” students and giving them an overview of the story before we dive in to the actual, non-Reader’s Theater text, for a more thorough read.
I hope you’ll try this activity. My students absolutely love this. They come to class, begging for Reader’s Theater!
Inspire! Middle Grades ELA and Social Studies 