Sunday, April 19, 2009

Reader's Theater Student Podcast


While carpooling with a fifth colleague, Deb Welner, she mentioned that her students were less than thrilled to listen to the weekly audio CD of the core story. So we decided to begin creating audio versions of the reader's theater at the end of every StoryTown theme using fourth and fifth graders. This is our first. The story is Exploring the Gulf Coast and it is from fifth grade theme 6. Students were given scripts a couple of days ahead to practice, then we put all the students together (4 from fourth and 4 from fifth) so they could practice. They read and recorded it twice using the iPod with the mic and this was the best read. The plan is to do another reader's theater from either fourth or fifth every week with a different set of kids.

I also uploaded the recording to archive.org which gives me the code for the player you see above. I embedded the recording on our class reading wiki so students could listen to it during centers. I also burned CDs for each fifth grade teacher using iTunes.
SIOP lesson plan

2 comments:

Wesley Robinson said...

We love doing an occasional Reader's Theater with Storytown and other materials, but it never occurred to me that one could record the readings for later consideration. Fine idea- perhaps it will push the students to build their comprehension of characters as they read with greater feeling. Thanks!

Kelly Berry said...

Reader's Theater is wonderful at all ages. My first grader's love reading with their friends. I, too, like your idea of uploading the book to a site...The kids sound great.