Oral language through performance

An under utilised and extremely good resource are the plays in the school journals. Why?? You can search reading level, topic and amount of parts in each play. This makes planning easier.

These were used to enable students to develop their oral language skills in a realistic setting, that they had on most cases not been exposed to.

Students started with just understanding the vocabulary in the text and how it was used to tell a story. Something they have always done through guided reading!

The next stage was to learn their part, this proved very quickly to be the challenge. They had never been asked to learn lines before. Why is this important? They quickly realised learning their part in isolation was difficult but learning as a group made the "cues" easier and soon the flow came to their reciting. Listening was a skill they didn't first think they needed, but soon it was as big a part as say their lines. Another part that helped was they also needed to have an under study partner. Once they had their lines, students were tasked with thinking about the character interactions and expression of certain lines.

Once they were learnt we could go on to expression and delivery of lines. This was the fun stuff! Students experimented with anger, sarcasm, excitement etc; Something they found they never did when reading before.

This all tied together over a 2 week period, with a "show" at the end. No lighting, no props, and costumes, just voice and body to tell the story.