Dramatic Learning

About

Dramatic Learning expands proven approaches to building reading fluency and content comprehension. By turning texts into plays, skits, and monologues and providing teaching tools to apply these materials in the classroom,Dramatic Learning can help students become more fluent readers, understand core concepts, and internalize content.

Look Inside

Take a look inside Dramatic Learning!

Content

Dramatic Learning offers wide range of opportunities to help students improve reading fluency and internalize concepts with creativity and imagination.

Dramatic Learning pairs standards based content with dramatic readings of plays to teach material in a new way.

Features

Alongside 42 different plays, Dramatic Learning offers many tools for classroom instruction, library programming, and distance learning:

• Select play units contain activities, written to the student's point of view. These include materials list and clear instructions for fun activities such as creating a flipbook or growing grass hair.
• An assessment rubric that can be downloaded as a PDF and applied across any of the site's plays, listing more than 20 areas of focus for students' work.
• Dramatic Learning content is aligned to your state's or province's curriculum standards.
• Users can double-click a word in any play script, activity, project, and more to see its definition in the pop-up dictionary.
• Take your class to the next level with How to Put on a Play, step-by-step guidelines for making a theater production out of the play script. Topics covered include "Stage Directions," "Sets and Props," and more.
• Lesson plans are tailored to meet curriculum-based standards and specifically relate to each play unit's content. They contain both an educator page and a student page.
• Mini-inquiry projects cross the curriculum and incorporate critical thinking skills.
• There are 42 play scripts available on Dramatic Learning, covering various grade levels and subjects.
• Play starters are writing exercises to help students get started with creative writing.
• Help bring your play to the stage and attract an audience with Posters and programs .
• Skits and monologues are short scripts to help students practice performing and public speaking.

Studies

Plays inherently come with built-in strategies to help students read better. The acting out of play dialogue compels readers to work more closely with the text to interpret it and project meaning into the experience. As a result, students show improvement in vocabulary, comprehension, and retention.

Critical Links, a study by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education, concluded that “the value of classroom theater in facilitating an understanding and interpretation of literature is deep and long lasting.” Further, the study reported that “research shows consistent positive associations between dramatic enactment and reading comprehension.”

Additional research has shown that repeated guided oral reading is the most effective method for improving fluency. According to the National Reading Panel, guided repeated oral reading procedures that included guidance from teachers and peers had a significant and positive impact on word recognition, fluency, and comprehension across a range of grade levels.

Many studies have shown that while it is essential to provide students with high-interest, leveled-reading texts, reading fluency among struggling and reluctant readers will not improve unless students are also instructed on how to read and comprehend these materials. Time to Act, a study by the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, found that “reading aloud or guided reading can (help improve reading fluency) by exposing students to how written texts capture the rhythms of speech, and also by providing them with the opportunity to hear the proper pronunciation of new words.” The study found that educators who encouraged repeated readings through performance and reader’s theater saw marked improvement in reading fluency.

See it and Try it

Witness the remarkable results of Dramatic Learning through this series of videos that show how a fourth-grade class used the program to learn and perform Hamlet in only one week.

Or, try it for yourself.

Contact Training

For additional information, questions, or other feedback email training at training@worldbook.com.