The Feds Could be Watching You!

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Click here to go to Mack's TpT StoreI’ve heard horror stories. There’s one about a federal official who caught a band teacher photocopying sheet music. The school was fined $10,000 and the band director lost his job. True story? I don’t know, but it’s evident from the FBI warning at the beginning of that Bill Nye video I show every year that copyright infringement is serious stuff.

This got personal for me when the criminal underworld started pirating my plays, apparently in an attempt to turn a fast buck (which is ironic, given that I have yet to make a fast buck from writing these things). A thoughtful reader contacted me about it after discovering a site where my play, Stolen Childhoods, could be illegally downloaded.

I immediately went into sleuth mode, quickly tracking down the offending site, fully prepared to fire off a cease and desist e-mail or maybe even call the 1-800 number on that Bill Nye video. I quickly discerned, though, that the “criminal” was merely a middle school language arts teacher who’d posted my play online for her students to read as a homework assignment. Seemed innocent enough to me. Here was a hard-working middle school teacher using my work as the centerpiece of what looked like a pretty significant unit of study about child labor during the Great Depression. I was flattered. And yet, this did indeed represent a copyright infringement.

I’m a great fan of technology. I use it extensively with my own students, and I want to encourage others to do the same. But I suspect we could all use a little tutoring when it comes to copyright infringement on the web. If you want to post one of my plays on your classroom website, go for it. However, please toss in a few safeguards. Consider password protecting your site, adding a watermark to the posted-PDF, and at the very least, including a highly-visible warning that ONLY your students have legal authorization to download (maybe one showing a big badge like they have on the FBI warning!).

Another reader recently asked me if I’d develop a play based on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s THE Great American Novel as well as a significant player in the high school literary canon. Frankly, I’d love to craft a play around it.

But I can’t. It would be an infringement. Because To Kill a Mockingbird is still under copyright, without the permission of the copyright owner, I don’t have the right to sell any such adapt ion. This makes me wonder about a host of other reader’s theater scripts for sale on TpT. From Charlie Brown to Charlotte’s Web to Dr. Seuss…I wonder just how “legal” such products really are.

Know that every play I produce has been legally adapted. What’s more, most all of them have previously appeared in Scope and Storyworks, meaning my wonderful editors and diligent fact-checkers at Scholastic have gone over them with a magnifying glass and a copy of the Chicago Elements of Style.

All my plays also come with reproduction and performance rights. The original purchaser is licensed to print a full classroom set for use in his or her classroom once each year. And those same students are licensed to perform it, whether in the gym or the Performing Arts Center over on Ethel Merman Boulevard. That’s not the case with scripts appearing in most drama magazines or with plays available from theater publishers. Their terms require you to purchase expensive performance rights—even if you’re an underfunded school.

I didn’t ask that middle school teacher to remove my play from her site. I don’t want to discourage her from using my play or technology, and for the most part, her classroom site is difficult to find. My hope is that, like the reader who reported it to me, my customers will respect the copyright notice clearly printed on each play and purchase legal versions. To those of you who respect copyright, thank you!

Happy directing.

Black Students Denied Service

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Rodney_Powell_Nashville_sit-ins_1960 PD NonrenewedImagine seeing the words “Whites Only” at your favorite restaurant! We can be thankful that it’s unthinkable today. But when so much time has passed, how do we help today’s kids truly make sense of such attitudes and events?

On February 1st, 1960, four African-American college students walked into a Woolworth’s Store, sat down at the lunch counter, ordered and were refused coffee. They vowed to stay until the store desegregated its lunch counter. Five months later, Woolworth’s finally relented and began serving blacks and whites alike. It was an important moment in the history of American. The event is portrayed in my original Storyworks play, “Sitting Down for Doctor King.”

What better way to honor his legacy, meet the Common Core, and give your students an authentic Civil Rights experience than by re-enacting events such as Greensboro? Read aloud plays put your students in the action, allowing them to understand the motivations and feelings of the participants firsthand. Read Aloud Plays also help satisfy many of the Literature and Information Text standards in grades 3 through 7. But students can also utilize Read Aloud Plays to “adapt speech to a variety of contexts”, “evaluate a speaker’s point of view”, and “integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media…,” which are all Speaking and Listening standards.

And there’s no limit as to how you use them. Pair plays with discussion, history videos (there are a ton of them on the Web), chapters from your History text book, works of literature, picture books, and more. Read a play once, or divvy up parts and practice for three or four weeks. Read Aloud Plays can be fit into almost any schedule and almost any curriculum.

For starters, check out my original Read Aloud Plays about the Greensboro Sit-ins, the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and The March on Washington, where Dr. King presented his I Have a Dream speech. Or explore some of my other Black History plays. Nearly all my plays were commissioned by and originally published by Scholastic, so you know they’re of the highest quality, and all of them come with reproduction and performance rights. If you’re new to using drama, also be sure to download my free guide.

Satisfy the CCSs and bring MLK Day to life for your students. Download some Read Aloud Plays today. Happy Directing!

Happy Holidays!

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Here’s both a holiday treat and an example of how Read Aloud Plays can be adapted to be recorded as short films. This one, developed and enacted by my 5th graders from 2012-13, is based on my Christmas Carol play from Read Aloud Plays: Classic Short Stories, but with a little creative thought (and, admittedly, a lot of logistics), nearly any of my plays can be adapted for film. Happy Directing!

Expert: Common Core May Be Too Complex for Your Students

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SSPP CoverI recently attended a presentation by a University of Oregon professor discussing the challenges of revamping the curriculum to satisfy the Common Core. One thing I came away with was that consistently using Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs will most certainly help, so rather than blog about reader’s theater, this week I’d like to chat about your writing instruction.

The good professor displayed a question from a fifth grade standardized test and asked, “What makes the following difficult?”

The Earth is a bit like a perfectly boiled egg—with a semi-liquid yolk or “core,” surrounded by a thick, soft layer called the mantle, and covered by a thin hard shell called the crust. The core in the very center is metal but the crust and mantle are made entirely from rock.

Fifth graders, she suggested, are not typically exposed to sentences with multiple clauses or with such a breadth of punctuation. When they do encounter such complexity—such as when reading independently—they’re typically left to decipher it themselves. Users of Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs, however, know that my writing program teaches these deciphering skills explicitly. By asking kids to construct and discuss sentences containing commas in a series, dialogue, dashes, or even ellipses, they’re more prepared to understand them when they encounter them in their reading.

Everyone publishing anything having to do with curriculum is claiming it meets Common Core. No doubt you’re discovering that many don’t actually do so. However, the Super Sentences program very clearly aligns to Conventions of Standard English in grades 3 through 6 (L.3.2, L.4.2, L.5.2, L.6.2). For example, L.4.2.c requires that students “Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence,” which is taught in Super Sentences activity #5 and reinforced throughout all later sentence-writing tasks. Super Sentences, in fact, teaches all the Language standards (L), while Perfect Paragraphs covers all the Writing standards (W). Additionally, Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs indirectly supports meeting the standards for Craft and Structure in both Literature (RL.#.4, RL.#.6) and Informational Text (RI.#.4, RI.#.6).

Now you can watch a “how-to video” on using Super Sentences in the classroom. The fourteen minute tutorial consolidates four days of instruction. In each 20 minute session, each student wrote one sentence fitting a specific construction (in this case, using semi-colons), and the class analyzed and discussed four  or five of these student-generated sentences each day. On the fourth day, students crafted the sentence on which they received a grade (using a simple rubric). The teacher’s role is to facilitate student discussion. Of course, complete details on how to implement the program appear in the book.

You can purchase Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs at Scholastic.com, at Amazon.com, or for immediate download in PDF, at Scholastic Teacher Express. It’s a complete year-long daily writing program in a small package, and it’s a surefire way to help prepare your students in grades 3 through 8 for the complex new world of the Common Core.

When Your Character Gets Questioned

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SCOPE-110113-PlayWhat can you do when your character gets questioned but you’re unable to defend yourself? In my new play in the November issue of Scholastic’s Scope Magazine, a peasant in 19th-century France is accused of a crime he didn’t commit. The harder he tries to clear his name, the less people believe him. Does he get what he deserves? Guy de Maupassant’s classic story, A Piece of String, makes a great characterization activity. Vivid characters, a compelling plot, and a interesting moral make for great classroom discussion. You can get A Piece of String by becoming a Scope subscriber, and you can preview the play here.

Common Core Wearing on Ya Yet?

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TellTale Heart110x150Like most of you, the start of the new school year has left me scrambling to keep up. Fortunately, Read Aloud Plays can help. Take a look at what teachers are saying about using plays in the classroom.

Mack, Thanks for another excellent RT. I am a loyal fan of your work. Always a hit with my students too. – Anne J.,

Thank you! My wonderful editors at Scholastic and my fifth graders seem to be of the same opinion. My 45th play, an adaption of De Maupassant’s “A Piece of String,” is scheduled for release in an upcoming issue of Scope Magazine, and I have three other Scope-commissioned plays waiting in the wings. RT users can also utilize my work by purchasing either of my two collections: Symbols of America or Classic Short Stories. I also have twenty read aloud plays available on Teachers PayTeachers. Because most of these originally appeared in either Scope or Storyworks, you can bet the quality is top-notch..

Used this on a family civil war themed camping trip with my own family. – Dowdy K.

I find this really telling. After all, when was the last time anyone took an HM text book on a camping trip? Read Aloud Plays work because they’re fun. Couple the fun with great content such as a classic tale or an important historical event –and you have academic gold!

Highly Recommended. I was able to tie much of my social studies in with LA due to many good “reader’s Theater” plays like these. Thanks. – Shannon P.

I’ve crafted numerous reader’s theater scripts for Scholastic covering the Civil Right Movement and American History. Especially poignant plays include Sitting Down for Dr. King, which is set during the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, and Freedom for the First Time, which deals with a slave family’s reaction to the conclusion of the Civil War. The latter made me cry when I wrote it, and even now after dozens of uses, still makes me tear up.

Another winner for this high school sped teacher! – brettandjenn02

Read Aloud Plays allow students to read repetitively, something that many Sped students didn’t do when they were preschoolers. Consequently, RT is an ideal method of improving fluency. Download my free guide to using drama for more information on the brain research behind Read Aloud Plays.

Fantastic way to energize my 8th graders!—sorlando678

An old veteran of the classroom once told me that “fun” teachers make sure kids enjoy school, good teachers make sure kids learn what they’re supposed to learn, but great teachers do both. Read Aloud Plays both engage students and support the CCSs.

This reader’s theatre provided a nice alternative to standard aloud reading for my class as they completed their short story unit.—nancyhn

Rather than just reading a classic short story such a The Monkey’s Paw, Cyclops, Sleepy Hollow, or Peter Rabbit, how about reading the short story and enacting the play at the same time? What a great way for kids to develop their inferential comprehension!

Happy Directing!

How Much is a Stress-Free Sub Day Worth?

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EZSubPlans5.1Whether a classroom teacher, substitute, or administrator, EZSubPlans will provide you with inexpensive, kid-tested plans at the touch of a button. Each EZSubPlans package includes at least seven hours of grade-specific lessons designed to make your next absence easy and worry-free. Classroom teachers wanting to avoid the frustrating and time-consuming process of preparing for an absence and substitute teachers needing back-up material will find everything they need with EZSubPlans. And what better time to prepare than before the school year begins! Days are labeled by grade level, but each can be easily adapted to suit one grade level up or down. A fifth grade teacher, for example, could use the lesson plans for grades 4, 5, and 6–that’s six days in all. Teachers need only to download, print, and photocopy–the sub does everything else.

Imagine, your first six absences of the school year already prepared. On each of those mornings, you merely set the EZSubPlans file on your desk and walk away! Click here for more information about EZSubPlans or click here to preview or purchase at TeachersPayTeachers. How much is a stress-free sub day worth? Who can say. How much does a stress-free sub day cost? Just $5 a day with EZSubPlans.

State Testing Linked to Premature Baldness

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The Birthmark scope cover pageI’m willing to admit to a high degree of frustration when it comes to standardized testing. In fact, during the latter part of the most recent school year, state testing had me secretly yanking fistfuls of grey hair from my head. I had so many kids being pulled out of my fifth grade class to either test or get remedial instruction, rarely (if ever) did I have my full group. It made for some dysfunctional lessons requiring reteaching material to kids who were already being retaught material from previous years. Still, as my Admin is fond of saying, “testing is the reality in which we live.” Embrace it or die (at least that’s how I translate it).

Well, I’m happy to say my students did just fine on state standardized tests, especially in reading where nearly all either met standards or growth targets and average fluency scores soared. Why mention it here? Because I long ago abandoned traditional text books and instead built my reading program around read aloud plays. Along with chapter books and content reading (primarily history content from Storyworks magazine), read aloud plays are the mainstay of my instruction. Not only do they build fluency and provide the framework to teach comprehension skills, they also increase the love of reading. It was no surprise to me that during our annual book give-away the last week of school, one of my reluctant readers eagerly snatched up a copy of A Christmas Carol. He’d had a small part in our movie adaption back in December and was still enthusiastic about it.

While some of my colleagues look at the new Common Core Standards with trepidation, I’m confident my young thespians will continue to thrive. In fact, I’m already mapping out another year of read aloud plays. You can see my tentative plans below, and if you’d care to jump on the reader’s theater bandwagon, you’ll find all of the titles either on my TpT Storefront, in one of my books^, or coming soon via this website*.

I’ll close with one warning: using read aloud plays to improve test scores means more than just handing out scripts and inviting kids to read. To see the nuts and bolts of how it’s done, download my free article, Why Use Drama?

September–Exploration: The Fountain of Youth, Lewis & Clark and Bird Girl, Fly Me to the Moon

October—Halloween Theme: Penelope Ann Poe’s Amazing Cell Phone, The Tell-Tale Heart^, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow^, The Monkey’s Paw, The Birthmark*

November/December–Christmas Theme: Ebenezer Scrooge, The Gift of the Magi^, Gabriel Grub*, The Necklace^

January–American Revolution: The Secret Soldier*, The Legend of Betsy Ross^, Eagles Over the Battlefield^

February–Slavery & Civil War: Spies & Rebels, Freedom for the First Time, Box Brown’s Freedom Crate

March/April–Civil Rights: Sitting Down for Dr. King, Freedom March, We Shall Overcome, Selma to Montgomery: Let it Shine*, The Girl Who Got Arrested, In the Jailhouse with Dr. King, I Have a Dream: The Childhood of MLK^

May—Just for Fun: Peter Rabbit, A Retrieved Reformation, Cyclops v Odysseus*

All right, I’ll close (for real this time) with the fine print: Read Aloud Plays won’t stop your classroom instruction from being interrupted by standardized testing. Nor will it decrease your risk of premature baldness due to the same. But done right, read aloud plays will have a positive impact on your reading test scores.

Happy directing!

Why You Should End the Year with Algebra

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The Little RascalsI think much of what I know about teaching, about kids, about life itself, I learned from Spanky and Our Gang.

Like many of us here near the end of the school year, exhaustion has just about got the best of me. The wide-variety of year-end responsibilities and activities coupled with the cumulative day-to-day stress of the job itself has become a bit overwhelming. It has me looking for some fun but easy lessons to wrap up the last few weeks of school. It got me thinking that I’d like to share with my students some Little Rascals episodes, so I went looking for them on YouTube. If you’re not familiar with the Little Rascals, it’s the depression-era film shorts featuring the antics of impoverished kids such as Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, and Stymie (and a mule named Algebra). I grew up watching “Spanky and Our Gang” on Channel 42 out of San Francisco—beamed to my home in Oregon via the relatively new innovation called cable-tv.

Sure enough, YouTube has a wide variety of clips, and as I watched a few my wife suggested that my love for kids and my destiny to become a teacher may have roots in the Little Rascals. The more I think about this, the more I believe it. There’s no doubt I admired the ingenuity and resiliency displayed by these kids. There were rarely any adults on the show. The kids had to solve complex problems and overcome difficulties without the assistance, guidance, or even supervision of grown-ups. I think this “can-do” attitude has helped me forge my way through life. And there’s no doubt I enjoyed the innocence and sweetness of all these kids. Yes, I think “Our Gang” had a profound impact on my career choices, as well as my penchant for using plays in class.

I have particularly strong recollections of the Our Gang “Follies,” in which the kids built a make-shift theater in a barn and staged a vaudeville show. Although these were not among my favorite episodes, I’m certain they influenced my teaching. In 1998, when I built a stage inside my classroom, I sewed together a heap of scrap fabric to make curtains that, not surprisingly, looked a lot like those that parted for Alfalfa’s performance of “I’m in the Mood for Love” or Darla’s tap and baton-twirling routine. I’m still using those curtains today, and I think about the Little Rascals every time I put them up for a play.

I intend on ending the year with an algebra lesson (that is, a segment of Little Rascals featuring Algebra the Mule), but another good activity with which to fill these last days of schools is reader’s theater. I believe read aloud plays are most beneficial when they’re read repetitively, when kids read and re-read the same text over and over again as they practice for an eventual performance. However, this time of year, there’s nothing wrong with giving kids a set of scripts and letting them wing it. Give them a session or two to utilize their “Spanky-esque Can Do Attitude” and then watch the follies unfold. To help you along, here’s a free PDF of my play based on O.Henry’s depression-era story, A Retrieved Reformation, but you should also try Peter Rabbit, Penelope Ann Poe’s Amazing Cell Phone, A Tell-Tale Heart, and Fly Me to the Moon, all of which are available on my TeachersPayTeachers page, as well as The Nose, Rikki Tikki Tavi, and The Open Window, from my book: Read Aloud Plays: Classic Short Stories. Finally, Read Aloud Plays: Symbols of America contains Argument at Mount Rushmore, As American as Apple Pie, and Eagles Over the Battlefield, each of which make for fun, impromptu entertainment that beats a real algebra lesson any day.

Happy directing!

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino

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Click here to preview or purchase at TpTIt’s spring, and aside from being that glorious time of year when we can finally start replenishing our supply of Vitamin D, it’s a great time to consider alternative settings for classroom play performances. “All the world’s a stage,” writes Shakespeare in As You Like It, which sounds to me like a good excuse to ditch the school auditorium and head out of doors. Take a walk around your school campus. That grassy knoll, that bridge across the playground structures, and the steps in front of the dilapidated main building might all be excellent venues. Have the performers present their play at the top of the steps, or seat your audience on the steps themselves and stage the play down below. Keep props and costumes to a minimum, provide your kids with multiple opportunities to practice (which builds fluency), and be sure to invite other classes to come watch.

Excellent plays to perform out-of-doors include How Jackie Saved the World (see previous post), Fly Me to the Moon (about the Apollo moon landing), Bird Girl (about Sacagawea), and my personal favorite, Peter Rabbit (a great one for olders to perform for youngers). If you’re lucky enough to have access to back issues of Scholastic’s Storyworks magazine, try Aesop’s Fables, Tom Sawyer’s Saturday, or Babe, the Valiant Pig. Finally, plan to take your back-to-school plays outside as well. Consider using my play, Cyclops vs. Odysseus, which originally appeared in Scholastic’s Scope magazine in September 2012. It’ll be available through TpT this August.

Happy Directing!