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Reader's Theater Exercise 14:
Help Your Students Gain 'Multiple Literacies' With
Reader's Theater and Visual Arts

(Image) Painting a Story With Pictures and Words

Last month, our Reader's Theater exercise allowed students to write and perform their own Reader's Theater dialogues in the form of a song, strengthening their reading fluency with the rhythm and melody of familiar tunes. This month, Reader's Theater Exercise 14 will showcase the relationship between reading, writing, and drawing and the importance of visual thinking in comprehension.

We are all familiar with illustrations usually found in children's books, which both entertain and help to explain the events of the story, but just looking at pictures is not the only way for students to benefit from visual arts. The act of drawing a scene (or a person or object) gives the learning students a fuller perspective and imagination of the event or object being shown.

According to Dr. Susan Rich Sheridan, drawing is an innate ability and the first step children take towards literacy. Young children use drawing to represent their thoughts and ideas before they are able to read and write. Literacy is not really just about words; it is about conveying meaning through visual symbols, including words, pictures, and numbers. The use of "multiple literacies" gives us the highest potential for thinking. Incorporating visual arts into Reader's Theater increases the fun students already have with the activity and therefore improves attention and interest even further.

This month's free classroom activity asks students to read short Reader's Theater excerpts and imagine what will happen next in the story. The students will then draw pictures showing what they think will occur. Finally, they will write a brief extension of each scene, telling the story of the events they already drew. Having students draw before writing will help them to visualize details in their minds that they can later include in the written form of the story--details they may not have thought of without being guided to draw their ideas!

Click here to get this month's free Reader's Theater exercise for helping students build multiple literacies!

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