Literacy Now

Teachers who want to make Readers Theatre a more regular part of their reading curriculum often ask us where to find scripts for their students to perform. Although school and community libraries, as well as most classrooms, are filled with stories, informational texts, and reading materials, individual and collections of scripts are not as easy to find—especially if a teacher has a particular topic or concept in mind. In this post, we hope to help teachers become more adept at finding the kinds of scripts they want to bring into their classrooms.

The following are five suggestions for finding scripts or creating your own.

• Search published collections. The first place to look for scripts is where you already look for books and other reading materials: in your classroom, school, and community libraries. Although limited in numbers and scope, most children’s librarians will stock their shelves with at least a few scripts that can be practiced and performed in a classroom setting.

• Check the Internet. The Internet has a vast repository of scripts that can be easily downloaded and copied for classroom use. Many of the scripts you will find online are actually written by teachers who upload them for public use. A Google search yields a host of free sites (such as timrasinski.com and thebestclass.org) that offer a variety of scripts for free download.

• Write your own scripts. This might be a great time to tap into your writing potential, shake off your writer’s block, or enhance your amateur writing career. You can transform almost any text into a script. After choosing a text, consider how to approach the scripting process. Some texts have plenty of dialogue while others are heavily narrated, in which case you can add several narrator parts or change narration into dialogue. For instance, if the text reads, “Superman flew faster than ever to save Lois,” you could modify it so that Superman’s dialogue tells the story, “Oh no! I have to fly faster than ever to save Lois!”

Creating your own scripts also enables you to cater to your students. For example, fifth-grade teachers might script a short section from a novel. If you have a class of emergent readers, a narrated or teacher-led script might be a more suitable starter script for your classroom. Or, you can make one up.

• Use poetry. We have also found that students love to perform poetry. You can choose any poem and easily transform it into a script by adding narrators. A great source for funny, child-friendly poems is gigglepoetry.com.
• Have students write the scripts. We feel that students themselves are the ultimate source for scripts. When students write scripts based on stories or segments of stories they have read, they must engage in deep comprehension and analysis. Making inferences is one of the highest forms of comprehension. When turning a story into a script, students learn how to create inferences through dialogue and description. Students can also create nonfiction or informational scripts. When doing so, they will have to perform research to ensure that the information they convey in the script is accurate.

We recommend that you start by scripting existing texts. Poetry is an easy genre to begin with; there’s very little dialogue, so students are essentially breaking the poems into meaningful phrases or stanzas and assigning narrators. In our experience, short stories are a good next step.

There are no limits on what texts can be used, so let your students choose their favorite texts and let their imaginations take over. We hope that this brief article provides you with enough resources to implement Readers Theatre throughout the year so you can see the results for yourself. 

Chase Young is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University and a former elementary school teacher. He is the coauthor with Timothy Rasinski of Tiered Fluency Instruction: Supporting Diverse Learners in Grades 2–5 (Capstone).

Timothy Rasinski is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University and a former elementary and middle school teacher. He is the author of the bestselling book The Fluent Reader (Scholastic) and a member of the Reading Hall of Fame.

Faida Stokes is a doctoral student in literacy at Sam Houston State University. Formerly a special education teacher, she is now an educational diagnostician. She is the coauthor with Chase Young and Timothy Rasinski of Readers Theater Plus Comprehension and Word Study to appear in The Reading Teacher. 

To help students grow into informed, socially aware global citizens, we must allow them to explore the different languages, traditions, and history behind cultures around the world through multicultural literature. We must also encourage students to think critically about leading social and political issues and connect them to resources that will give them better insight into these global concerns.

Read about how you can do all of these things, ultimately guiding your students to have a better understanding of the world around them.

• Notable Books for a Global Society: A Slideshow to Share
• Fostering Global Citizenship Online
• Go Global! Multicultural Books for Children and Young Adults
• Let’s Build a World Together
• Connected Kiwis: Blogging With Students in New Zealand

Clare Maloney is a former intern at the International Literacy Association. She is currently seeking a BA in English from the University of Delaware

Writing is a critical literacy skill that plays an increasingly important role in everyday life. Our students need to demonstrate sufficient writing abilities, not only to meet schools’ curriculum requirements, but also to fully participate in social and civic activities.

Today’s standards place more emphasis on expository writing as well as writing as a tool to facilitate learning. However, students with language impairment (LI) tend to find writing particularly challenging. Therefore, it is critical that teachers understand how to provide writing instruction that supports students with LI.

Teach expository writing strategies

Research has shown that students with LI can benefit directly from learning strategies for planning, composing, editing, and revising expository essays. For example, the strategy mnemonic TREE BRANCH can help struggling learners to plan and compose compare–contrast essays:

• Tell what you are comparing and why
• Report important similarities and differences
• Elaborate on each point
• End with what the reader should learn
• Brainstorm idea words
• Recite self-talk
• Ask if ideas will meet goals
• Now, write with good organization, powerful words, and accurate information
• Challenge yourself to come up with more ideas
• Have a look for mistakes

Revision checklists can be used to facilitate revision of both content and mechanics.

Teach writing self-regulation strategies

It is important that students with LI understand how to self-monitor and self-regulate their performance during writing. Within the self-regulated strategy development model, students not only learn writing strategies, but also how to set appropriate writing goals (e.g., generating three superordinate categories for compare–contrast essays), instruct themselves on the strategy use (e.g., “OK, now I need to…”), monitor their own writing progress on a chart (e.g., recording the number of compare–contrast text elements included), and self-reinforce their performance (e.g., “I’ve done a good job writing up this paper!”).

Provide language support during writing instruction

Language difficulties make it challenging for students to generate key ideas (e.g., superordinate categories when comparing and contrasting two subjects/concepts) and use precise and impactful vocabulary in their expository essays. Therefore, teachers need to incorporate vocabulary support into their writing instruction. For example, complicated new words need to be presented to students multiple times and in varied contexts. Scaffolds such as picture cues and visual organizers could be presented to help students understand the meaning of the words. Teachers can also provide student-friendly definitions of keywords and discuss expository texts that effectively or ineffectively use these words.

Providing writing instruction that incorporates self-regulation strategies as well as language support could contribute to better overall writing performance for students with LI. Note that substantial time should be allowed for these students to practice and internalize the taught strategies.

Mei Shen completed her doctorate in special education at Michigan State University with a graduate specialization in language and literacy education. Her research focuses on providing evidence-based reading and writing instruction for struggling students with language difficulties.

Mei Shen will present a session titled “Empowering Students With Language Impairment With Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Expository Writing” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Math is often perceived as a challenging subject to teach and to learn. This line of thinking often stems from early learning experiences that relied on traditional teaching models. Today, more teachers are embracing non–content area books to help students understand and apply abstract mathematical concepts.

Our experiences with integrating reading and math have convinced us that if we teach math skills and concepts using popular children’s books, we can effectively engage and teach even the most reluctant learners.

In some important ways, learning to read and learning math are different. However, conceptualizing mathematical thinking using age-appropriate, quality children’s literature allows for productive experiences that enhance students’ mastery of the subject.
Working together, we developed guidelines for selecting books, concluding that the books must allow us to

• Connect to our students’ background knowledge
• Bridge abstract knowledge to concrete knowledge
• Apply new knowledge to real-world situations

With these guidelines in mind, we then generated a list of timeless classics. Two main selections and activities proved especially effective.

Amazing Grace. Mary Hoffman. Caroline Binch. 1991. Dial. Make spiders and have students number the legs on the spiders. Allow children to count (by twos) the legs on the spider. Push the math concepts of the book forward by providing coins from the U.S. and Trinidad so that students can compare the coins and use them to purchase the spiders made in class.

All by Myself. Mercer Mayer. 2001. Random House. Using ordinal numbers, recount the sequence of events in the book. Have children use teddy bear cookies as counters to vote on the kind of juice they want to have with their cookies for snack. To reinforce the book’s main idea, make a graph illustrating the number of students who have little sisters, little brothers, or neither.

The activities above can be used with a variety of books and adapted for use with children from pre-K through second grade. If early childhood educators use books that are carefully selected and pre-examined for their value in teaching mathematical concepts and skills, the children will be motivated to engage productively in learning. They will ask more questions, make more requests, and become involved in useful learning experiences, just as mouse did when he was given a cookie.

Delilah Davis is an assistant professor in reading and early childhood at Texas Southern University. She serves as the director of Field Experience and Clinical Practice.


Ingrid Haynes is an associate professor in reading and middle grades at Texas Southern University. She serves as the department chair for Curriculum and Instruction.

Delilah Davis and Ingrid Haynes, along with Summer Pannell and Reginald Todd, will present a session titled “Literacy Strategies for Improving Mathematics; Developing Autonomous, Self-Directed Learners” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Classrooms are more diverse than ever before. In our interconnected world, students bring a range of languages, literacies, and cultural practices into their schools. As educators, we’ve often thought about culture as something associated with a student’s ethnic heritage. However, a newer approach to teaching and learning called culturally sustaining pedagogy challenges us to promote, celebrate, and even critique the multiple and shifting ways that students engage with culture.

Django Paris, associate professor of language and literacy in the College of Education at Michigan State University, developed culturally sustaining pedagogy to extend asset-based teaching approaches such as culturally relevant pedagogy for the 21st century. His approach challenges us to go beyond acceptance or tolerance of students’ cultures and to move instead toward explicitly supporting aspects of their languages, literacies, and cultural traditions. Culturally sustaining pedagogy also encourages us to consider the term “culture” in a broader sense, including concepts such as popular, youth, and local culture alongside those associated with ethnicity.

Recently, educators have taken up culturally sustaining pedagogy within particular academic content areas. My colleagues (Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola) and I have examined what culturally sustaining pedagogy might look like in literacy classrooms in Chicago, IL. We’ve found a few practices that literacy teachers might try as entry points to this work.

Seek out nontraditional texts. In our research, literacy teachers sought out nontraditional read-alouds and mentor texts for writing. We’ve documented teachers going beyond canonical texts and incorporating videos, student writing, poetry, and more into culturally sustaining units. Teachers might also consider using blog posts, memes, podcasts, and other artifacts as reading material or writing models. In addition to potentially promoting students’ cultures, languages, and literacies, these texts encourage broader ideas about what counts as reading and writing in schools.

Explore and model meshing languages. Language is a critical part of culture. Rather than require only “standard” English in the classroom, culturally sustaining literacy teachers explore, model, and support the meshing and blending of language varieties. We’ve documented teachers speaking and writing in ways that blend languages, dialects, and formal and informal registers. In addition to helping students see themselves in the texts they write, this approach helps students note complex power dynamics surrounding language use.  

Encourage students to explore alternative cultural affiliations. Culturally sustaining literacy teachers understand that students engage with a wide range of cultural groups and encourage them to explore these affiliations. In our research, we’ve seen students explore Chicago culture, culinary culture, digital culture, and more. Teachers can ask students about spaces, places, and communities where they feel like cultural “insiders” and can help them connect with these communities in person or online. This practice helps students and teachers understand the complexity of culture and the multiple affiliations of every student.

These suggestions just scratch the surface of what it means to teach literacy in ways that are culturally sustaining. Teaching, like culture, is complex. However, by approaching our practices with this cultural complexity in mind, we may be able to see and understand our students’ languages, literacies, and cultural practices in deeper and more meaningful ways.

Emily Machado is a doctoral candidate studying literacy, language, and culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She researches equity-oriented writing pedagogies in urban classrooms. Previously, she worked as a public elementary school teacher in Washington, D.C. She tweets at @emilynmachado.

Emily Machado, along with Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola, will present a session titled “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the Urban Literacy Classroom: Lessons from Mr. C’s Class” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.