Acting/Role Play
Overview
Creating and acting out texts or original narratives can enhance literacy for young learners, solidifying their comprehension and building Narrative Skills. As learners make decisions about what to include as part of a dramatization, they must comprehend, recall, and carefully reflect on how to organize story elements, supporting Foundational Writing Skills. Dramatic play provides an opportunity to draw on students' cultural knowledge, and develop an appreciation for diverse backgrounds. It is important for educators to develop their own cultural awareness in order to recognize and facilitate the connections students may see between their background and literature.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch this preschool teacher help facilitate dramatic play with young learners. Dramatic and role-based play after reading texts can help strengthen Background Knowledge and enhance reading comprehension. For older students, teachers can have small groups act out different stories and encourage other students to guess the text.
Design It into Your Product
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Active Learning Strategies
Students activate more cognitive processes by exploring and representing their understandings in visual form.
When young children draw and are encouraged to explain their drawings, they are sharpening the cognitive and motor skills involved in conventional writing.
When students explain their thinking process aloud, they recognize the strategies they use and solidify their understanding.
Visiting places connected to classroom learning provides opportunities to deepen understanding through firsthand experiences.
Free choice supports learner interests and allows more complex social interactions to develop.
Games help students visualize new information and immerse themselves in the learning process.
Imagining allows students to step back from a problem or task and think about it from multiple angles.
Reading aloud allows students to hear and practice reading and fluency skills.
Playful activities, including pretending, games, and other child-led activities, can support the development of learners' Metacognition and also inspire their narratives and writing.
Project-based learning (PBL) actively engages learners in authentic tasks designed to create products that answer a given question or solve a problem.
Response devices boost engagement by encouraging all students to answer every question.
