Innovations on Decodable Texts, Part 3: Readers' Theatre
Reading to Perform
Dear Reader,
This will be our last letter on decodable texts for a little bit. This series of letters on decodable text has sparked lots of conversations with our schools and colleagues. We hope it’s done the same for you. Really, our overall goal is that kids are learning to read and learning to love it (which we know doesn’t come through decodable text reading alone, of course). We hope these games and information about decodable texts has helped you think about both of those things!
(By the way, here’s our first post on decodable texts, if you missed it. And the follow up FAQ is here. Here’s the first post about innovations on decodables,‘Let’s Act’, and last week’s, ‘Let’s Talk’.)
Readers’ Theater Scripts with Decodable Sentences
Another possibility for a decodable text--which we’ve just learned that Burkins and Yates choose to call Aligned Texts (Shifting the Balance - Nice book!)--is a readers’ theatre script. Here are a few benefits of these scripts:
Kids enjoy them!
Each role can have the same phonics focus, or roles can have differentiated phonics foci.
Because kids have a motivation to perform, there’s an authentic purpose for rereading.
If each role has the same focus and kids need the same concept, they can switch roles!
Here’s an example Lizzie made:
Here’s a printable version.
Lizzie created this script to work with students who had mastered CVC, CCVC, CVCe, R-Controlled Vowels, and Vowel Teams. The students were learning about decoding multisyllabic words with the VCCV pattern by breaking the word between the consonants. They were able to apply their learning, and had a blast! Now, certainly, kids at this stage of phonics development (working on multisyllabic words) wouldn’t need to be reading all or even mostly decodable text, but this was a great opportunity for students to apply their phonics knowledge.
We hope you’ll consider creating some decodable scripts for students. And of course, let us know how your writing of this kind of text goes. (And if you get the chance to try any time soon!)
See you next week!
Marie and Lizzie
P.S. We had a long debate - Reader’s Theatre? Readers Theatre? Readers’ Theatre? (Ha!) So we chose what we thought made the most sense. Also, as a theatre person, Lizzie prefers theatre to theater. :)