To set up a chapter in a novel for Reader’s Theatre, we go through the book beforehand and find the scenes that best lend themselves to theatre.
Next we backwards plan. Before we ever do a chapter in a novel, we must absolutely have identified any words in the novel that the kids don’t know (to me that means haven’t acquired through hundreds of repetitions already in the class sometime that year.
It is not just boring content that makes the kids dislike the book. Their lack of interest can also be due to the fact that they haven’t seen the words before. People enjoy reading something when it is easy for them and when they can get into a flow with it.
Jason makes the distinction that the students at least need to have internalized (which is close to acquired – just under it) all the words. Not having been at least exposed to all the words in the chapter pretty much guarantees failure of the chapter.
Over time you will know exactly what words your students know and don’t know. It’s a very intuitive process, the king of whom is Blaine. He just knows what they don’t know. It’s something that comes with practice. In the meantime, if you feel weakness from the students on a certain word or phrase, just PQA it for awile. It’s fun and crucial to the success of the scene.
How do we make sure that the kids know all the words in each chapter before starting the translation of the novel with RT of the scenes that we have picked out in advance (the scenes that would lend themselves to RT). Do we have to write a script and do a story around the three words? That was the thinking at one time, but it just takes too long.
The language team at George Washington High School in DPS does the PQA to teach the word. Department Chair Joseph Dziedzic at GW (sitting next to me at the workshop) leaned over and told me that everybody in his whole department only does PQA around the words he needs to teach, using no stories to get this done.
That makes absolute sense, because in reading we are reading novels and we cannot possible combine Steps 2 and 3 – it would take forever. Just PQA the words you want them to know. It’s quicker, and you can get as many repetitions if not more in PQA than in stories.
Then, when we start reading the chapter, we just go through it in the regular way (see Reading Option A on this site for suggestions) we create little scenes from what we read. The students have the book in their hands during this time and the focus is on reading, as per the four previous posts here on RT.
As the kids have the books in their hands, we use the actors as props and tell them what to do. (There is a scene in Extras in which Sir Ian McKellan explains to Ricky Gervais how this works that is worth looking at for anyone in need of having a laugh.)
We will create a template for this process (the “RT Asking” process) in future blog posts on RT as we continue this series on Reader’s Theatre, or what I like to think of as the salvation of Step 3 of TPRS.
Isn’t the idea that we could make the reading of novels really interesting via RT, with the codicil that, before doing any scenes, we absolutely get enough PQA reps on each word in the chapter of the novel before doing the scene?
To try to sum up this overview of RT, we can say that if we prepare each chapter of the book that we want to read in advance by identifying and doing PQA on the vocabulary that is not familiar to the students (this is backwards planning), and the book is at reading level (Blaine’s big contribution lies in giving us level appropriate books), then we can make our reading classes work with the added high voltage support from RT.
IT’S NOT THE BOOK – IT’S US. We can make even Pauvre Anne comelling using RT! It comes in now, like a breath of fresh air, to the all-important work of making sure that our kids read enough (at least 50% of the time, in my opinion) so that our fluency programs work at the highest level possible for our students.