Using Drama Strategies to Enhance the Read Aloud in the K-12 Classroom

Using Drama Strategies to Enhance the Read Aloud in the K-12 Classroom

By Brynn Hambly

Hearing text read aloud by a teacher is beneficial for students of all ages, including middle school and high school students. Reading aloud provides opportunities for children to imagine and visualize the characters, environments and conflicts in a text. When a teacher reads aloud to students, those students benefit from hearing the tone, pitch, timbre, and pacing of the text, thereby increasing fluency and enhancing language and speech development.  Reading aloud can also be beneficial for the classroom teacher. By allowing her to infuse her own imagination into the reading of the text, she is repositioned as an active and creative part of the teaching experience.

However, the read aloud experience can be deepened by using simple drama strategies and structures. Drama structures allow physical movement, play, and personal connections to be a part of the read aloud. Additionally, drama structures create additional pathways for students to construct meaning. The following structures can easily be infused into a read aloud and require little prior planning.

• Tableau (also called frozen pictures) – A tableau is an image or picture made with the body that has no moving and no talking.  Students can be invited to make a tableau of a character, feeling, or moment(s) in the book.

• Pantomime – Pantomime is when actions or emotions are conveyed without speech.  After reading an active line, such as, “she carefully took the key out of her pocket and without making a sound, slid it into the keyhole,” invite the students to pantomime these same actions.

• Repeated line of text – This is simply having the students repeat the line of text after it is read. After the teacher reads, “The man angrily said, will you stop doing that?” the students try out what the line “Will you stop doing that?” would sound like.

• Repeated physical gesture – A gesture is a movement of the hand or the head that expresses meaning. When reading and the text says something such as, “she threw her arms into the air” have the students demonstrate what they think throwing her hands into the air would look like.

• Soundscapes – The soundscape is the sounds heard in a particular location. By using their hands and mouths, students generate the sounds (without words) that would be found in a particular environment.  For example, if a busy city center is mentioned in the text, the teacher would invite the students to create the soundscape for the city. Students may contribute to the soundscape by adding the sounds of cars, honking horns, walking, etc.

These structures are intended to be explored by students in unison, at desks or on a carpet. Students should not come to the front of the room to “perform” these actions. Rather, the drama structures should be woven into the fabric of the read aloud. According to Mem Fox in Radical Reflections, “There is no doubt that reading aloud teaches. And there is no doubt that little kids – and big ones – love being read aloud to” (Fox, 30). When using drama throughout a read aloud, the students experience the joy of being read to and are also active participants in the reading, and constructing, of the story. Students have opportunities to enact compelling parts of the book. In Radical Reflections, Fox goes on to state that, “From my own experience I realize that the literature I heard, rather than read, as a child resonates again and again in my memory whenever I sit down to write. It’s the sounds I remember rather than the sights of the words…How are children expected to develop a sense of rhythm or a wide vocabulary? By being read to, alive, and a lot!” (Fox, 68).

Fox, Mem. Radical Reflections.  NY:  Harcourt Brace, 1993.