Lights, camera, read!

The project in essence is a rehearsal of a play. Students will read a story out loud and discuss the different parts of the story. From the story read the students will be given a play. Equal distribution of the play parts will be given to the students accordingly. The students will read and reread the play in class as part of their daily oral reading activity. As students practice reading their selected parts the teacher will record the student using a handheld digital video camera. After each recording the teacher will conference with the student to view their performance. The student will receive automatic feedback from the teacher and personal constrictive criticism from themselves as they view the recording. The play rehearsal will take approximately 4 weeks before the actual performance takes place. The day of the performance, the teacher will record students using the camera. The teacher will copy the performance from the camera and put it in a recordable CD. The recordable CD will be passed to each grade level for viewing. After viewing the recordable CD, it will be kept by the teacher for future events such as open houses and parent teacher conferences. The teacher may use the CD to share the students’ reading improvements with the principal and other teachers. Throughout the year there would be multiple performances and viewings by the school. Towards the end of the school year the teacher would put all the performances together on a single CD for each student in the class. The students would be able to take this CD home and share all the performances they did in the year with their parents.