American History Readers Theater provides hours of fluency practice that is grounded in the familiar format of American history and features characters students know and may even admire. The scripts and activities in this resource address standards in reading, speaking, and listening while providing a fun environment for everyone involved. When students practice their lines, they read and reread the same passages. Under your direction, they gradually add more expression, read more smoothly, and find any subtle meanings in the passages. American History Readers Theater also meets the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act through direct instruction in three of five key elements of reading instruction: reading fluency, text comprehension, and vocabulary development.
Discover innovative ways to incorporate fluency practice into reading instruction! This professional resource provides teachers with engaging and practical strategies for bringing fluency instruction into daily reading routines. Written by fluency expert Timothy Rasinski and literacy and reader’s theater expert Chase Young, this book offers instructional strategies to help teachers understand fluency and how to teach it. With step-by-step strategies, detailed lessons, and ideas for improving fluency, this meaningful guide allows teachers to provide purposeful reading opportunities for their students. Help every student become a confident and fluent reader with this professional resource!
Why use Readers Theater in history classes? The format gives students a sense of involvement with the human dramas that make up history. Performers can feel the excitement as Archimedes discovers the displacement of water. They can relate to the terrors of a slave s passage from Africa to the Americas. They can imagine the tension of wading through the water at Omaha Beach as bullets strike their buddies. Each script (12 15 per book) is accompanied by background information, literature connections, extension activities, and discussion questions.
Ancient Civilizations Readers Theater provides hours of fluency practice that features characters students know and may even admire. The scripts and activities in this resource address standards in reading, speaking, and listening while providing a fun environment for everyone involved. When students practice their lines, they read and reread the same passages. Under your direction, they gradually add more expression, read more smoothly, and find any subtle meanings in the passages. Ancient Civilizations Readers Theater also meets the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act through direct instruction in three of five key elements of reading instruction: reading fluency, text comprehension, and vocabulary development.
This series of Reader's Theater books provides high-interest scripts featuring everything from amusing fables and fairy tales to inspiring inventors and historical heroes. Each script comes with expicit fluency instruction, a list of key vocabulary, and engaging comprehension activities. Each book describes in simple terms how to direct instruction and coach students as they practice their lines. Each unit can stand alone as fluency instruction or tie in to a related content-area unit. These resources meet instructional objectives as outlined in the No Child Left BehindAct.
Improve students' reading fluency while providing fun and purposeful practice and performance through Reader's Theater Scripts. Engage students through Reader's Theater to make learning fun while building knowledge of Texas history and the significant people, events, and places that make Texas what it is today. Improve vocabulary and comprehension with repeated practice and performance of the scripts along with TEKS-based activities in the lesson plans, which include word study, comprehension questions, and extension activities. Make your classroom a Reader's Theater classroom today!
Teaching with primary sources can be overwhelming to teachers who have minimal time to teach social studies. Turn your classroom into a primary source learning environment with this easy-to-use resource that has everything you need to incorporate primary sources into today’s classrooms. Primary sources provide firsthand accounts of history that will capture students’ curiosity about the past. Students who observe, reflect on, and question primary sources understand history at a deeper level than students who only learn about social studies through textbooks. With more than 100 digital primary sources, this book by Kathleen Vest delves deeply into a wide variety of primary sources and details how they can be used in any K–12 classroom. Model lessons for three grade ranges (K–3, 4–8, 9–12) reduce teacher prep time. With fun and engaging activities and a chapter devoted to strategies for using social media posts as primary sources in the classroom, this resource is essential for today’s social studies classrooms.
This exciting compilation of readers theatre scripts for the 4th to 8th grade social studies classroom brings history to life via the adventures of explorers across the globe. Throughout history, powerful kings and queens have sent their emissaries on quests for land and wealth to expand their empires. But what about those emissaries? A man who ventures to sail into uncharted seas, knowing he may never return. A woman who disguises herself and walks into forbidden lands. What gave them the courage and the strength to face many daunting challenges? How did they feel during the worst and best times in their adventures? Readers Theatre for Global Explorers gives social studies teachers and school librarians a tool to introduce students to the determined men and women who ventured into unknown territory. This collection of short scripts for 4th–8th grade students teaches about explorers, their native cultures, and the lands they found. Just as importantly, they make learning fun.
A brilliant and daring account of a culture war over the place of theater in American democracy in the 1930s, one that anticipates our current divide, by the acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro From 1935 to 1939, the Federal Theatre Project staged over a thousand productions in 29 states that were seen by thirty million (or nearly one in four) Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before. At its helm was an unassuming theater professor, Hallie Flanagan. It employed, at its peak, over twelve thousand struggling artists, some of whom, like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, would soon be famous, but most of whom were just ordinary people eager to work again at their craft. It was the product of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the republic, bringing Shakespeare to the public, alongside modern plays that confronted the pressing issues of the day—from slum housing and public health to racism and the rising threat of fascism. The Playbook takes us through some of its most remarkable productions, including a groundbreaking Black production of Macbeth in Harlem and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here that opened simultaneously in 18 cities, underscoring the Federal Theatre’s incredible range and vitality. But this once thriving Works Progress Administration relief program did not survive and has left little trace. For the Federal Theatre was the first New Deal project to be attacked and ended on the grounds that it promoted “un-American” activity, sowing the seeds not only for the McCarthyism of the 1950s but also for our own era of merciless polarization. It was targeted by the first House un-American Affairs Committee, and its demise was a turning point in American cultural life—for, as Shapiro brilliantly argues, “the health of democracy and theater, twin born in ancient Greece, have always been mutually dependent.” A defining legacy of this culture war was how the strategies used to undermine and ultimately destroy the Federal Theatre were assembled by a charismatic and cunning congressman from East Texas, the now largely forgotten Martin Dies, who in doing so pioneered the right-wing political playbook now so prevalent that it seems eternal.
Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE The first oral history to fully explore the contributions of black women intellectuals to the Black Arts Movement, Sistuhs in the Struggle reclaims a vital yet under-researched chapter in African American, women’s, and theater history. This groundbreaking study documents how black women theater artists and activists—many of whom worked behind the scenes as directors, designers, producers, stage managers, and artistic directors—disseminated the black aesthetic and emboldened their communities. Drawing on nearly thirty original interviews with well-known artists such as Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez as well as less-studied figures including distinguished lighting designer Shirley Prendergast, dancer and choreographer Halifu Osumare, and three-time Tony-nominated writer and composer Micki Grant, La Donna L. Forsgren centers black women’s cultural work as a crucial component of civil rights and black power activism. Sistuhs in the Struggle is an essential collection for theater scholars, historians, and students interested in learning how black women’s art and activism both advanced and critiqued the ethos of the Black Arts and Black Power movements.
