Week 2 Drama

This week's drama workshop picked up and focused on a seminal part of student learning: literacy. Before this week's workshop and lecture, I would have not thought that there was such an intimate connection between dramatic expression and literacy. However, through the wonderful, creativity-inspiring, and downright fun activity of reader's theatre, strong literacy skills can be built and nurtured. Numerous research has apparently been conducted examining the efficacy of reader's theater in improving overall literacy. Research findings indicated a "significant increase in fluency" (Johnson, 2011). In addition, Johnson (2011) states that reader's theater "gives teachers an authentic reason to engage readers in meaningful, repeated readings that can increase reading fluency and enable both striving and thriving students to better comprehend text and become higher achieving readers." In addition, I believe that reader's theater also improves reading and oral expression skills and confidence. Learning to speak and express oneself well is certainly a positive personality trait that will help in many aspects of a child's (and adult's) social and academic life.

This week's drama workshop allowed us to experience and engage in RT for ourselves. Our group was assigned the "On the Ning Nang Nong" song, which I have never heard of since I didn't receive my schooling in Australia. Nonetheless it was enjoyable and challenging deciding how to divide the parts up amongst the 10 of us. As the song contains many rhyming parts and rhythmic elements, we decided to highlight certain parts in our script to make the performance more resounding. The red underlined parts were lines our entire group shared, while the blue highlighted lines were my trio's lines (bottom row). We made special emphasis on changing up the tone, speed, pitch, and loudness of several of these highlighted lines. These are critical elements of expression and fluency that we use in everyday language. For instance, the "jibber jabber joo" line was extremely slow, low pitched/ominous sounding and also accompanied with heavy gesturing with arms and body swaying. The "catch'em when they do!" line was the opposite - quick, staccato, high-pitched/excited sounding.

Our Reader's Theater script, parts highlighted

Our performing group in tierd formation

In addition to arranging the reading of the script itself, part of reader's theater is to make use of the stage and take into consideration physical arrangements. The other two groups in our class utilized completely different group/stage set-ups. This concept will be important to consider when adapting reader's theater to my future students. It will be quite a task arranging 25-30 excited and nervous primary aged children in organized and effective manner. The classic convex triangle formation, as well as the tier/rows system that our group used are the most efficient and easiest methods of arrangement according to Victoria.

References
Johnson, D. (2011). The effects of a reader's theater instructional intervention on second grade students' reading fluency and comprehension skills (Unpublished Ed. D.). Walden University, Minneapolis.