Reader's Theater Exercise 17:
Creating Earth Day Themed Reader's Theater For Fluency and Building Community Citizenship

Last month's Reader's Theater Exercise helped your students activate their minds to the fullest potential for learning by combining physical activity with a Reader's Theater rhyme or rap. This month's exercise is designed for Earth Day on April 22, and provides basic information on "green living" that students will need to write, practice, and perform their own Earth Day themed Reader's Theater scripts.

Teaching kids about how they can live in order to protect and preserve our Earth is a valuable and crucial lesson to instill. Hands-on activities and projects are useful and inspiring, but with academic curriculum pressures there may not be class time to devote to planting trees or cleaning up the school grounds. Luckily, Reader’s Theater can provide a way for students to both work on essential reading skills and develop their citizen mind sets as members of their communities and our planet.

The following Reader’s Theater Exercise teaches students about environmentally friendly ways of living, asks them to draw a poster advertising a school Earth Day event (imaginary, or real!). Students will then be instructed to write a Reader’s Theater script in which they (themselves and classmates) organize an Earth Day event, design a presentation on things you can do to help the Earth, or discover something interesting about nature or helping the environment. This allows students to practice and get used to the idea of taking action to help the environment when the school cannot help them actually take part in an ambitious project this year.

Click here to get this month's free Reader's Theater Exercise
for improving reading fluency and teaching environmental awareness.