Readers' Theater with Flip - Lori Metzger and Karen Morris

After watching our colleagues demonstrate how easy a Flip camera is to operate we thought we'd give it a try. What better way to show your students work with fluency than a Readers' Theater? We found the perfect play to read on election day in our social studies book. The message was about working together as a community to take a stand against something you don't agree with. In this case, a movie theater was going to be built on the children's soccer field.

Students were put into heterogeneous groups and asked to read the play three times out loud. Each time they were told to practice using inflection in their voices and pay close attention to the punctuation marks. We chose this particular group of kids and taped their first and third reading. Wow! What an improvement! Not only did their expression and pace improve but they read over a minute faster!

When we reviewed the video with the class their success was obvious to us all. It really demonstrated the power of re-reading!