The Actors In All Of Us: Thanks Robert Munsch!

I love Robert Munsch stories. I have always loved Robert Munsch stories. There's something about his characters and the extreme situations that always make me giggle, and I've read most of his books so many times, that I have them memorized now. One of my favourite Robert Munsch books is Mortimer.

This week for a read aloud, we read Mortimer, and then my students worked in groups of four and five to retell the story and create their own puppet plays. They're going to practice and perform their plays early next week, but in lead-up to that, we retold the story today (with a few small changes) in Readers' Theatre style. One of my students suggested that we videotape the performance so that we could look back at it later and see how we did, and I thought it was such a good idea, that I was happy to oblige!

While I think that I'll need to continue to work on my videotaping skills, I'm so glad that we did videotape this. Even my most reluctant actor was eager to participate here. Everyone chimed in with the different lines from the book, and all of my students acted their parts. We then watched the video afterwards, and I was amazed at the feedback the students provided. They reflected on ways that they could stay more in character, and they even reflected on ways to make for a smoother ending too. All of us are excited to perform Mortimer again next week. We hope to email Robert Munsch a link to our performance too: he inspired this after all.

We hope that you enjoy this video. Please share some of your Readers' Theatre success stories here too. We'd love to hear what you do!

Miss Dunsiger And The Grade 1/2 Class

Our First Mortimer Performance

An Update

Today (January 24th) we performed Mortimer again as a class. The students watched their other performance first and reflected on ways that they could improve their acting. They tried to stay in character, perform their lines with loud clear voices, and quiet down when necessary at the end so that we could have the final scene with Mortimer fast asleep. The children were so proud of their performance that they emailed Robert Munsch with a link to their video. They are hoping that he might come for a visit. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

The students are definitely excited for our next big drama activity. Do you have any great drama activity suggestions to share? I'd love to hear them!

Aviva