Reader's Theater with Carol Gaab, Kristy Placido, and Carrie Toth

I said that I could listen to these ladies all day, so today that's just what I did!  In this session, they were supposed to be trying to sell their books, but TPRSers aren't the best at the hard sells, so they took their books and showed us how to use reader's theater with 5 of their latest books.  Sadly, they aren't all in French...yet.

So, here is the process.

1. Read the novel and note scenes that would be great to act out.  They suggest scenes with a lot of action, characters or confusion to help the students really understand what is going on.
2. Write out the props needed for the scene
3. Pick your actors and give them director's notes while the rest of the class is engaged in a partner activity.
4. Call the attention back to the actors.  The teacher narrates the scene (reads from the book) while the actors do the actions/say the dialogue when the teacher pauses after a phrase.  The slooooower this goes, the better.  

The sections that we did were paragraphs and not much more.  I'm not sure if they would do longer sections if we weren't crunched for time...I'll have to ask.

Once the scene had been performed, you could do more with the scene.  At the end of one scene, Carol asked us to finish the scene with the actor doing a different action.  Then, we shared our sentences and the actor did those activities.  It was great because we were working on the structure "and finally she Xed".  Carol also did something she called Snapshot or FreezeFrame.  The teacher re-reads a sentence from the scene and calls on a group to run and put themselves in a position to act that sentence out so that she could take a photo of them.  Next sentence, same thing, continuing until she had a slideshow to go along with the scene.  I'm thinking that this would be great for re-tells (and while she is taking the pictures, there is MORE REPETITION, but in a sneaky way).  I love to be sneaky...