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Goal

Students will have an opportunity to experience the thrill of the arts through a live performance of Tony award-winning productions of Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain in Fort Myers, FL at the Barbara B. Mann theatre. Seventy-five (75) ninth grade students will engage in a cross-curricular unit combining U.S. History curriculum, literary analysis through their language arts and reading curriculum, and the arts, creating a perfect trifecta of learning and life-long experience! In addition, while at Barbara B. Mann, we will tour the FSW campus after the show, further exciting our students and expanding their horizons as they explore a college campus that may well be in their futures! 

What will be done with my students

For the first three weeks of the unit, students will be reading and engaging with a variety of high-interest, higher order thinking short stories through their language arts curricular materials (HMH textbooks have a plethora of standards-based resources centered on U.S. History and historical interest topics and reading materials related to Poe and his historical time period and Mark Twain and his life and times. These materials will be used to engage in the close reading experience model (read whole-group for understanding, re-read in small groups with a specific purpose, reflecting and responding orally and in writing, synthesizing the materials through the creation of a product such as a movie trailer, an iMovie summary, a virtual plot summary, literary elements mapping, One-Pagers, and through high-order whole-group discussions such as Philosophical Chairs and Socratic Seminars).

For the next two weeks after that, students will work in small groups to practice script reading, performing, and analysis with various free resources from Aaron Shepard’s Reader’s Theatre resource page. These resources will allow the students to further synthesize the information they gleaned from their historical readings in their HMH textbook and turn them into short readers-theatre scripts to act out in small groups, thus demonstrating their understanding of the literary elements and theatrical components, but also larger historical themes and implications to society, not to mention acting skills.

At this point, students will have the opportunity to travel to the Barbara B. Mann Theatre to experience a live performance of Poe and Twain from Encore! Productions, a travelling theatre group specifically for students. Students will then be able to have a question-and-answer session with the actors, deepening their understanding of and appreciation for historical fiction acted out on the stage.

From there, the culminating project will require students to work in small groups to either a) find (with appropriate guidance and instructional support) another historical reader’s theatre script related to the themes of the time periods utilized in the productions, to read, analyze, discuss, practice, and act out for the whole group, or b) create their own readers theatre script using our historical whole-group readings as support and creative muses to then write out an act. All students will have a final product that must be acted out for the rest of the group. These performances will be taped and stored electronically. Students will assess themselves and one another using the performance rubric.
 

Benefits to my students

Educators have long praised the research-based benefits of using Readers Theatre and related strategies for increasing reading fluency and sight-word vocabulary, improving reading comprehension, providing opportunities to interpret dialogue and communicate meaning, and increasing awareness and appreciation of plays as a form of literature. Readers Theatre reinforces the social nature of reading (Busching, 1981) and provides an opportunity for students of varying abilities to work as a team in a cooperative learning environment (Flood, Lapp, Flood, & Nagel, 1992; Trousdale & Harris, 1993). With the addition of the historical themes and time period studies, students will enhance their understanding of historically relevant events in our nation's timeline, as well as immerse themselves in the time period by actively watching it acted out on the stage!

Readers Theatre taps the multiple intelligences of a reader and allows for multiple ways of understanding (Gardner, 1985). Recent studies by Griffith and Rasinski (2004) and Young and Rasinski (2009) indicate that Readers Theatre also promotes fluency and interest in reading. Through repeated readings of the text, students increase sight word vocabulary and the ability to decode words quickly and accurately (Carrick 2006 & 2009). The repeated readings allow the students to phrase sentences appropriately, read punctuation markers, and read with greater ease. This fluent reading enables students to spend less time on decoding and increase comprehension (Pikulsi & Chard, 2005).

Finally, this unit provides continued cultural exposure and appreciation to our students. The arts are such an important part of nurturing our young ladies and gentleman in their growth academically and personally.
 

Budget Narrative

75 student tickets/3 buses for travel 

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