The Gift of the Magi – ReadAloudPlays.com

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!

One of the department stores in my area pushed out their holiday inventory well before Halloween, which seem mighty early to me. But now is certainly not too early to be pushing out the holiday plays. While there may not be any Christmas pageants this year, reader’s theater is well-suited to remote instruction. Because kids have clearly-identified parts to read, your Zoom calls or Teams sessions can proceed fairly smoothly (bandwidth issues aside!). You can send students a hard copy of the script via email, or simply share your screen. Have kids practice their lines and rehearse in Zoom two or three times a week. When they’re finally reading the play smoothly, record it and share the recordings in your secure online environment. Add another layer of fun by encouraging kids to dress in costume!

I have a number of splendid RT scripts for the holidays, including my latest release, The Gift of the Magi. Originally published in the Nov. 2001 issue of Scholastic’s Storyworks magazine, it includes a comprehension activity that can be downloaded as a Google Form for free. That means in your secure Google Classroom environment you can post a PDF of the script as well as the interactive quiz!

I also have some wonderful Charles Dickens’ plays including A Christmas Carol, Gabriel Grub (the spookiest of Dickens’ holiday stories), and Pip & the Prisoner (from Great Expectations). You can check all of them out on my TeachersPayTeachers storefront. Happy directing!