Tag Archives: read aloud plays

What We Believe

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As you head back to school you may find yourself in long-winded meetings wrestling over your institution’s “mission statement.” I hope you don’t have to go through such torture, but you might. The mission has always seemed pretty darned obvious to me: give kids the best academic experience possible. Done. Now can we get to work in our classrooms?

A reader recently asked me what our mission statement is at ReadAloudPlays.com. I guess they felt inclined to subject me to the same kind of torture their admin was inflicting upon them. Well, our mission is pretty straight forward: Craft plays scripts that teachers will want to use because kids love them and learn from them. Done.

But, I guess I can’t shake all those teacher inservice sessions in which admins demanded we define the meaning of every jot and tittle, that we crossed our t’s and dotted our i’s, that we really descended into that rabbit hole of core beliefs, because here I am defining what exactly we believe at ReadAloudPlays.com.   

We believe that reader’s theater represents an excellent way to teach reading and engage students.

We believe that repetition leads to fluency. (See our free product citing the brain research.)

We believe scripts should be well-crafted. (I spent more than twenty years writing professionally for Scholastic.)

We believe in creativity. When I create a play, I’m trying to do something unique with it. We don’t believe AI can duplicate that.

Despite various benefits to AI (its ability to compile and summarize data, for example), we believe it will be detrimental to the arts.

We believe in live theater. We think live performances (of theater, music, etc.) will grow in demand due to the proliferation of AI-generated junk recordings and publications.

We believe standardized testing in its current form (a multi-billion dollar industry) is wasteful and unnecessary.

Though we believe in accountability, we don’t believe standardized tests accurately measure success. Nor do they hold all participants accountable (e.g. the students, their parents, and the community).

We believe “low performing” schools are reflective of struggling communities; not the other way around.

We believe voucher schemes are designed to funnel tax money to private interests and give tax breaks to wealthy people.

We believe schools are not businesses and shouldn’t be viewed as such. (See Jamie Vollmer’s book, Schools Can’t Do It Alone.) 

We believe business “efficiency” is a myth. (According to Harvard Business School, 80 to 90 percent of all businesses fail due to inefficiency, mismanagement, or a lack of demand. Those that succeed do so mostly because they land upon a “viral” product or service, not because they’re efficient.)

We believe in libraries.  Communities with functioning library systems are historically safer, healthier, and better educated than those without.

We believe computers in schools should be extremely limited, that online programs are poor replacements for real human instruction. (See The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle)

We believe teaching requires highly dedicated people (like you!).

We believe that social media and video games are highly addictive and damaging to their users and that the decline of reading is directly correlated to the growth of digital devices. (See The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.)

We believe the standard social media algorithm is damaging to society and should be restricted.

We believe in respecting copyright. We only create plays from material in the Public Domain or for which we have explicit license.

So there you have a long-winded, in-depth mission statement that’d make any administrator call for a second in-service session in November (right when report cards are due). But at least you have an idea where we stand.

Suffice it to say, when we create a play, we’re thinking first about how kids will enjoy it, secondly about what they’ll learn from it, and thirdly about how useful it will be to the teacher. We’re not getting rich doing this (just as none of us went into teaching dreaming of $$$). We’re doing this because we believe in the power of reader’s theater plays. If you’re into that, check out all the great stuff we have for back to school such as fun introductory plays like our Winnie the Pooh collection, The Sky is Falling, and Cyclops: The Monster in the Cave.

You Deserve a Chill Conclusion!

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“I experienced all the emotions. I laughed. I cried. I got angry. It was wonderful!”

No, this wasn’t a teacher summarizing her school year. This was an adult viewer of our recent fifth grade performance of “The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage.” But over the course of a full school year, I have no doubt you’ve experienced all the emotions, and if you’re approaching the conclusion of your year, you deserve to experience some joy. One way is to chill out with some end-of-year reader’s theater.

Our plays are masterfully crafted to make your students laugh, cry, and get angry… okay, mostly just laugh.  And for you, the teacher, these plays are easy time fillers. Devote 45 minutes or so to a single reading, or better yet, read it three or four times over a week for an impromptu in-class performance. Up the stakes by splitting the class into two or three groups and assigning each a different play. All you have to do is print copies and divvy up parts, and voila! — that’s a week’s worth of enjoyable language arts time! Along with Sausage, here’s a few recommendations:

Goldi Locks Home Reno – Our heroine wants to renovate your home!

The Pied Piper Slightly Twisted – the Revenge of the Rats!

The Nose – Gogol’s absurd story about . . . a runaway nose?

How the Elephant Got Its Trunk – From the Jungle Books

Barbed Wire – A rootin’ tootin’ cowhand version of Maupassant’s classic, A Piece of String

Toad’s Wild Ride – Even better than the Disneyland ride!

Nature Talks Back – talking trees and “killer” insects

And many others, too!  Or, if you’re looking for something more poignant, consider our Juneteenth play, Freedom for the First Time, or Stolen Childhoods, our wonderful script about Lewis Hine’s effort to end child labor a century ago. Our Newsies play is also a great season-ender. Whichever route you take, know that our plays are authentic, human made literary works, they’re kid-tested, and despite costing just four bucks, they all include basic performance rights and a comprehension activity.

Thanks for all your hard work this school year. Finish it up in style! Happy directing!

“Sausage? You’re alive?”

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Grimm Fairy Tales are indeed grim. Grandmas get eaten, apples get poisoned, children get fattened up for supper… But it doesn’t have to be that way. At ReadAloudPlays.com we’ve taken one of Grimm’s most disturbing tales and turned it into something quite delightful.

In the original story called, “The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage,” three roommates (yes, Sausage is one of them) have a happy and contented life until Bird meets another fowl who convinces him that he’s doing too much of the hard work. He goes back and demands change, which results in the sausage getting eaten by a dog, the mouse getting boiled in their kettle, and the bird drowning in a well. Imagine having your third graders enact that!

We couldn’t—so we rewrote it.  And now, having just produced it with a small group of fifth graders, I’m kind of thinking it may just be the best play we offer!  Read on to find out how to view our recording of it!

Our version calls for music support, that is, each character has a “walk up” song. With some guidance from me, the students selected pieces such as Who Let the Dogs Out for Dog’s entrance (of course they did!), and a slice of Pavarotti for our Italian Sausage, and for the crows, a German punk hit by Rammstein. Along with some simple but clever costuming and a few props, the play was engaging from beginning to end.

My dog actor did a good job of learning her lines and delivering them in Dog’s deadpan, aloof manner, but she’s shy and unassuming. I wanted her to enter the performance all frisky-like, to jump around the audience, to sniff first graders, but she just couldn’t do it. That is, not until I got her a squeaky dog toy shaped like a bone!  You can watch her and her fellow thespians perform the play on my public school site, The Daily Platypus. The simple recoding comes via a helpful parent (my Ipad decided to quit midway through the first act). You’ll see how each character entered and how our version remains faithful to the Grimms while being a blast to perform. To give you even more insight, we also recorded several important scenes without the audience. You’ll find them at DailyPlatypus.org as well.

The “walk-up” music we used includes Kali Flowers by Chris Joss for Mouse, Build a Nest by Earth, Wind & Fire for Bird, and Pavarotti’s Saint Lucia for Sausage. We also used Sehnsuct by Rammstein for Crow and the afore mentioned Who Let the Dogs Out for Dog. We used Stan Kenton’s morose version of Saint Lucia for Mouse’s boiling scene, and we reprised Kali Flowers for our conclusion. The music was edited for length in Audacity, but your sound person could simply fade out or pause each tune during your show. And don’t forget, you can select any music you want!

We decided to make all our sets black with silver outlines, which made for a cool Grimm-like essence. Our DIY paper masks came from Etsy sellers. The most challenging component of the play (aside from getting young actors to project their voices), was creating a costume for Sausage. It was well worth the extra effort. Here we are almost a week later and younger kids are still approaching the girl who played Sausage and saying, “Sausage, you’re alive?” and then telling her how great she is. She and the rest of the cast have all become celebrities!

Your students can experience the joy of celebrity too!  The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage, along with seventy other exceptional readers theater scripts, are available on our TeachersPayTeachers storefront. Each one has been carefully crafted by real humans and then kid-tested by real kids. Plus, they come with teacher notes, comprehension activities, and limited performance rights.

Happy directing!

Save Children by Banning Snake Oil Tech

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In a recent court appearance Mark Zuckerberg testified that there isn’t any research to substantiate claims that his “product” is addictive or harmful to kids. Yet, there’s a ton. And all of us in education shouldn’t just be taking note—we should be taking action.

Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation connects numerous studies proving screen time “rewires” children’s’ brain in dangerous ways. A recent 15 year study in Canada adds additional clarity: screen time is bad for kids.

Yet in every classroom I visit, screens have become a significant element of instruction.

To be clear, I’m not talking about using computers as “tools.”  Word processing, doing research, and communicating with families may indeed be appropriate uses. But, according to the research, programs that replace instruction are not.  As one recovering tech addict put it, they’re so chock full of artificial stimuli, real books can’t compete. Once indoctrinated in screen-based “learning,” students are unable to tolerate reading a paragraph in a text book or writing a sentence that doesn’t include an emoji. In short, they become non-readers.

Covid has been a convenient scapegoat for both low achievement and high anxiety, but if there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, it’s that screen-based learning didn’t work. Despite returning to regular school, test scores and suicide rates show that the nation’s children are not recovering from spending that year on screen-based programs. That’s because it wasn’t Covid that caused all the problems—it’s that we’ve doubled-down on screens, both at home and in school.

Today our school districts are spending gobs of money on snake oil tech ($30 billion in 2024). All that money spent on one-to-one devices and online programs such as Asselus and disLexia would be put to better use creating extra-curricular opportunities for kids, enhanced support staff scheduling, teacher salaries, improved prep time, or authentic reading instruction. Instead, the only real beneficiaries are the tech companies. Not school districts. Not teachers. And certainly not kids.

On top of the ginormous direct profits, Big Tech is also profiting from data mining.  Everything about you, your students, and your school is being stored on a server somewhere in the high desert of Central Oregon or the low valleys of Northern California and then sold to other companies that want a piece of your pie. Educators have long been concerned that their job security might someday hinge on student test scores, but imagine, too, a future where one of your former students applies for a job or fills out a college application or runs for political office only to have their low performance on an Aimslow or Zurn test way back in third grade sabotage their opportunity. (Yes, we purposely misspelled those to disparage the guilty!)

So what can we do? It’s time to reject screen-based learning. All of it. I know these programs can give overwhelmed teachers a bit of a break, but the studies show it’d be better to give your students time to simply draw, color, or read than to log in. Me, I’m making a commitment to stop relying on tech and I challenge you to do the same.

Because administrative initiatives almost always fail, a ban on screens needs to be organic. It needs to start with teachers rejecting tech and teachers encouraging parents to reject tech at home.  

Not convinced? Read Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, or Catherine Price’s book for teens and pre-teens, The Amazing Generation. Watch the 2024 documentary The Cost of Convenience. And share this article from Bloomberg about the Canadian study. Send these things to your board members and your open-minded admins. (In my school, we started seeing change merely by giving Haidt’s book to our principal.)

Here at ReadAloudPlays.com, we’re decommissioning our Google Forms products, the free comprehension quizzes that go with our reader’s theater. They offer a bit of convenience to teachers and they incentivize trying our play scripts, but because we believe our paper-based quizzes promote more authentic discussion, we’re moving on. We’re also making our own social media pages static.

Of course, we believe the best step any teacher can take is to utilize more “real” instruction—such as reader’s theater. In all the classrooms I visit these days, kids will almost always choose reader’s theater over screen-based activities. Visit our storefront at TpT to grab some exceptional play scripts, including our fun Chicken Little play panning social media.

Happy directing!

There’s Still Time to Commemorate BHM

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February is Black History Month. While I encourage you to acknowledge it with some dedicated activities, I’m also reminded that black history is American history; it need not be limited to a single month! The end of the Civil War, Jackie Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color barrier, and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech certainly rank among some of the most significant moments in American history. With that in mind, here are twelve great reader’s theater scripts with which to recognize those great moments while meeting numerous Language Arts standards. All the plays can be paired with a printed text, such as “The Ruby Bridges Story” with her autobiography, Through My Eyes.  Each pairing represents distinctly unique points of view (Literature CCSS #6), making for livelier discussions and quality comparisons (CCSS Lit #7). And because these plays are based on real events, they’ll also satisfy CCSS Informational Text #6. Each play includes a comprehension activity, too, assuring your students will satisfy numerous other standards as well. And because almost all my plays were originally commission by and published in Scholastic’s Storyworks and Scope magazines, they’ve been professionally vetted, making them the best reader’s theater on the market. Visit ReadAloudPlays.com for detailed pairings, or click on the title to preview or purchase on my TeachersPayTeachers storefront. Happy directing!

The Ruby Bridges Story

Box Brown’s Freedom Crate: His True Story of Escape

The Library Card: Richard Wright’s Journey to the Promised Land

How Jackie Saved the World: Jackie Robinson’s Breaking of the Color Barrier

Freedom for the First Time: The Day of Jubilee and the End of the Civil War

We Shall Overcome: The Birmingham Children’s Crusade

I Have a Dream: The Childhood of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gonna Let it Shine: The Selma to Montgomery March

MLK’s March on Washington

Sitting Down for Dr. King: The Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins

In the Jailhouse with Dr. King: The Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Girl Who Got Arrested: The Claudette Colvin Story

Here’s Help for that Holiday Chaos!

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The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas vacation can be real doozies. While thoughts of sugar plums may not derail that lesson you’ve been planning on verb gerunds, knowing there are new gaming systems, cell phones, and hover boards under the tree certainly will. There’s no doubt about it: this time of year the kids are all a twitter, prompting many a teacher to set aside serious content in favor of coloring pages featuring Rudolph, Frosty, or an occasional dreidel. But it needn’t be so. This is a great time to stage a play!  In so doing your students will get some quality fluency practice, partake in some interesting literary discussions, and, depending on how far you want to take it, occupy themselves with meaningful work creating sets, props, and costumes. And given that Christmas will be upon you in a flash, now is the time to get started, especially if you’re following our repetitive reading approach. Here are five classroom reader’s theater scripts ideal for the next few weeks.

A Christmas Carol—Our best-selling script! Scrooge in two forms!

The Gift of the Magi—A young couple trades their most precious possessions to celebrate Christmas in O. Henry’s famous story!

Gabriel Grub –When the gravedigger shows an unrepentant disdain for Christmas, he’s put on trial in an  underworld court room full of goblins. It’s Dickens’ spookiest Christmas story!  

The Shoemaker and the Christmas Elves—Facing ruin, the shoemaker is saved by a Christmas miracle in this Grimm Brothers classic with our unique conclusion.

Christmas in Many Lands— Gnomes and reindeer, trees and piñatas . . . it seems like Christmas everywhere is different yet somehow still the same! Our newest and most adorable little Christmas play about Christmas around the world.   

Whether a single play or one of our money-saving bundles, these will be the highlight of your holiday teaching season! Check them out in our TpT store.  Happy directing and Merry Christmas!  

It’s Time for Halloween Plays!

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Back a hundred years ago, ghoulishness was captured in short stories rather than comic books. Writers like Poe, Shelley, and Stevenson creeped out their audiences with dark tales of superstition, mystery, and insanity. The Gothic themes they created have been permeating literature, television, and cinema ever since. 

So what if your students are mesmerized by Venom and Doctor Octopus? There are plenty of mangled monsters and the criminally insane in W.W. Jacob’s classic, The Monkey’s Paw, Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hawthorne’s The Birthmark. They’ll also find that familiar ol’ headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow, and a hapless ghost in Twain’s A Ghost Story.  No, your kids won’t find my version of Rappaccini’s Daughter Pennywise-creepy or Slenderman-scary, but its chemical concoctions and mad scientists make it very nearly as engaging. Most certainly, it’s a key to unlocking the original’s subtleties and complexities.    

Your students know these themes. They’ve seen them on the Simpsons and Family Guy, in Goosebumps and Marvel Comics. But do they know from whence they come?  Though the archaic language and complex structures of these classic tales present barriers for most middle grade readers, you can make the stories more accessible by pairing them with reader’s theater. And what better a time to do it than Halloween?

All these plays are available on my TeachersPayTeachers and Etsy storefronts. They’re critically-acclaimed. They’re inexpensive. They each come with a comprehension exercise. We’ve also put our three most popular spooky scripts in a splendid Halloween bundle, making them even less expensive! Suitable for reader’s theater, podcast radio drama, or full stage production, they’re perfect for fifth graders and up (plus strong 4th graders)—but get started early to have them well-rehearsed by Halloween.

Happy directing!

Save $ with New Readers Theater Bundles!

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We’ve posted four new bundle collections, which offer big savings over single plays. Check them out on our TpT storefront!

Fairy Tales Slightly Twisted–Kids absolutely love performing these plays! Two unique versions of Goldilocks, a wonderful Brothers Grimm tale, and some hysterical Pied Piper action! Perfect for Back-to-School! All include the license to duplicate a full class set, school day performance rights, and comprehension activities. Click on the image to preview or purchase!

Weird Tales for Halloween — a collection of our most popular plays: Sleepy Hollow, The Monkey’s Paw, and a crazy version of Poe’s Tell Tale Heart. Buy now for Halloween!

The American Revolution Bundle — Five exciting reader’s theater scripts covering the American Revolution including The Secret Soldier, one of our most requested plays, and four others. Check our Eagles Over the Battlefield–a kid favorite for sure!

The Explorers Pack — Three reader’s theater scripts covering three eras. Divide the class into thirds and challenge each to present one of the three, then have all your students complete the standards-based compare and contrast activity. Teach history, reading fluency, and reading comprehension while getting your students excited about learning!

Happy directing!

My Kind of People

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When I invited motivational speaker Stan Tucker to drop in to play ball with my basketball group, I didn’t expect him to show up. After all, he’s exceptionally busy traveling around the country with his Leap For Literacy program, getting books in the hands of young readers with his Read’n Roll Book Mobile, and hosting his television show, The Very Airy Library, all while writing inspiring picture books of his own. Stan is a very busy man!

Yet show up he did. That’s the kind of person he is. Stan Tucker shows up.

Stan autographing a shoe after presenting at our Literacy Night.

Despite knowing he’d be spending the next ten hours working with students in our school, he popped his head in our middle school gym. “I haven’t played in at least six years,” he said, “and for shoes, all I’ve got are these Chuck Taylors, but I thought I could come down and shoot around with y’all.”

We quickly pushed him out there, and like the rest of us, he put in his 3 to 5 miles of court time. Then, an hour later, he was at our elementary school impressing and inspiring our staff and students.

I encourage you to check out Stan’s work. I can’t promise he’ll be able to join your for basketball, but I can safely say you love having him at your school. Find out more by clicking here.

Also, thank you Eileen B., Lit with Lyns, Melissa C., Shelby J., Candy M., Heidi P., Nicole W., Sherry D., Jarmese R., Melissa N., and Amanda M. for your recent 5-star reviews of my plays and products!  June 19th will be here before you know it, so be sure to download my inspiring Juneteenth play soon!

Happy directing!  

Earth Day + Arbor Day

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Nature Talks Back is a great play with which to celebrate Earth Day and Arbor Day while teaching your kids about trees, bees, and centipedes. The play’s ecology and conservation themes include that trees communicate, that some perceived pests are considered beneficial insects, and that honeybees are super-important pollinators.  The stories center around three oddball conifers named Luther, Otto, and Bill and their hysterical encounters with a host of pests.   

It’s aimed specifically at kids in upper 2nd through 4th grade, but it’s also suitable for grade 5 and up for reader’s theater, podcast, or stage— especially when performed for younger kids. (My fifth graders loved preparing a full production!) No time for a big show? Use it instead as in-class reading! It’s a fun way to teach about nature on Earth Day and Arbor Day!

Consider pairing Nature Talks Back with some of my other spring-oriented plays. Peter Rabbit is also aimed at younger students. Use it with 2nd and 3rd graders, or have older students perform it for primary-aged kids.  Rikki Tikki Tavi, Kipling’s much-loved story about the heroic mongoose has some spring-time flair, a singing bird, and an important theme about courage. It too can be presented alongside How the Elephant Got Its Trunk, another classic Kipling tale from The Jungle Books.  And don’t forget that baseball season is upon us, so it’s a great time for my entertaining and socially important play about Jackie Robinson.

Happy directing!