So You Want to Be President?

Posted on October 2, 2016 by Mackowiecki

It would appear being president didn't help Taft with his weight. Ah, politics. Everywhere you turn, folks are questioning the qualifications and competencies of each of the current candidates for the White House. No doubt your students are, too–parroting the perspective of their parents. It leads me to believe that kids need to hear what History reveals about being Commander-in-Chief. Take for example William Howard Taft (at left). Teddy Roosevelt used to call him a fathead, right there in public. And not just on the campaign trail either, but while Taft was serving in the Oval Office! Or how about Benjamin Harrison? He once said the Presidency was akin to being in jail!

With all that in mind, here’s a free play on the subject. It’s from my book, Read Aloud Plays: Symbols of America, and it’s free. Perhaps it’ll help your students to begin forming their own ideas about leading the country. At the very least, it’ll provide you with a timely language arts activity.

Note that this free version hasn’t been reformatted like all the rest of my plays. My apologies for the low-quality PDF of pages from the book (with an updated copyright notice slapped in place). I felt it was more important to get this to you before the debates and the election itself than take the time to get it reformatted. But if you like it, consider tracking down the original (its out-of-print, so it can be hard to find, but available through Scholastic’s Teacher Express), or watch for the reformatted version coming soon to ReadAloudPlays.com. It’ll be paired with a second “presidential” play and include extension activities, teaching notes, and a comprehension activity. You can also check out a ton of other nifty plays at my TeachersPayTeachers store. Nearly all have been previously published in Scholastic classroom magazines, so you know they’re of professional q

Girl. Fighter. Hero.

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Mackowiecki

Women soldiers? It’s not so unusual in 2015, but back in the 18th century, the very idea would have drawn guffaws from even the most liberal-minded colonist. “A ridiculous notion,” one patriot leader was known to have said. And yet, History provides numerous examples of women performing acts of heroism throughout the American Revolution itself. Lydia Darragh, for example, is considered one of America’s first spies. Then there’s Deborah Sampson. She disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Continental Army under the name Robert Shurtliff. Twice wounded, she performed surgery on herself to avoid detection. Another heroin was Sybil Ludington, the 16-year-old girl who rode forty miles on horseback through the Hudson Highlands (on a stormy night, no less!) to muster the militia in defense of Danbury. She’s known as “The Female Paul Revere,” and according to Martha Lamb’s 1880 “The History of the City of New York,” George Washington himself personally thanked her for her stalwart effort. Her story is captured in my latest play, “Girl, Fighter, Hero,” which appears in the November/December issue of Scholastic’s Scope magazine. Although it’s available exclusively to Scope subscribers, you can still get it by clicking here.

Whether you use Sybil’s story or not, a kick-in-the-pants way to get kids excited about your American Revolution unit is to build it around a trio of Read Aloud Plays. Start with a FREE download of “Betsy Ross: Fact or Fiction.” It first appeared in Storyworks back in 1999, and then in my book, Symbols of America. It challenges students to examine the facts associated with the first U.S. flag and draw their own conclusions. It’s FREE on my TpT storefront until November 1st. Free. I’m convinced you’ll love it and want to then grab “The Secret Soldier,” a historically-accurate depiction of America’s first female fighter, and “Eagles Over the Battlefield,” a dramatic yet subtly humorous play about how the eagle came to be an American symbol (as opposed to the turkey, the turkey vulture, and the groundhog). Eagles, by the way, is part of a BOGO deal with “A Bell for the Statehouse,” which relives that infamous crack in The Liberty Bell.

As with all my plays, these were all carefully-researched, fact-checked by Scholastic editors, and best of all, kid-tested by my own students.

One added note this week is that my play “Cyclops: The Monster in the Cave,” is making an encore appearance, this time in Storyworks. It’s been freshly revised by editor-extraordinaire Lauren Tarshis (author of the I Survived series). Check out the new artwork by Sebastia Serra, too! If you’re not yet a Storyworks subscriber, you should be, but you can also grab the original version of Cyclops off my website.

Happy directing!

Celebrate Your Slow Readers

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Mackowiecki

I recently read an article about how “slow reading” is gaining acceptance as an academic approach. Though the piece was aimed at high school and college instructors, the gist remains the same at the elementary and middle school levels: let’s slow our kids down and have them read meaningfully. To this I say, “hot dang!” I’ve long been an advocate of focusing on accuracy and beauty rather than speed.

The purveyors of Oral Reading Fluency measures no doubt developed their program with good intentions. They saw a correlation between quality reading and speed. They found that good readers, when tested by the minute, can read fast. Consequently, oral reading fluency has become the king of qualifiers for Special Ed and Title I services. The flaw is that the formula isn’t commutative (if I may borrow a math concept for a moment): good readers may be able to read fast, but it doesn’t work in the opposite direction. Emphasizing ORF scores teaches kids to read fast, but that doesn’t mean they’ll read well. In fact, all this emphasis on speed is probably causing kids to struggle more than ever.

The emphasis in my classroom is on reading with accuracy, personality, and comprehension. Obviously, I believe plays are the perfect vehicle for doing just that, though the process of re-training kids who have been under the ORF thumb for so long isn’t without its tribulations. My students just recorded their first set of radio dramas. When it came time to record, there was a lot of mumbling, stumbling, and stammering from some, while others read their parts like people actually talk. And, get this, there was no correlation between such quality reading and their ORF scores! In fact, some of my lowest “per minute” readers read the most beautifully; some of my highest, rather poorly. You guessed it: the factor of greatest influence was whether or not a given student read independently at home during the two weeks leading up to the recording session.

This month you can encourage great reading by staging a trio of plays for Black History Month in February. Plays such as Freedom for the First Time and Box Brown’s Freedom Crate teach about slavery while giving kids the chance to practice their slow southern drawls. Plays such as Sitting Down for Dr. King and The Girl Who Got Arrested re-enact inspiring moments from the Civil Rights Movement. There are several other Black History titles available (including this one–a free gift to my readers during January!), but whether you use my plays or not, consider jumping on the “slow reading” band wagon and let February be about teaching your students to read beautifully.

Happy directing!