Academic Integration

 Though each play has a primary focus of instruction, each play comes with some suggestions for integrating academics that can be tailored to your class's specific needs. As you read through the play, ideas will pop into your head in how to tie in all the disciplines. Moveover, you can ask the children themselves to think of ways to integrate the play into other academics. For instance, ask your 2nd-5th graders to write addition, subtraction, and multiplication word problems to accompany the plays, A Day at the Zoo or The Riverdale Musicians.

 Primarily, your focus in putting on the play will be to teach fluency, as children will realize that a monotonous voice isn't used when in conversation. They will learn to practice using fluctuations in their voices to express surprise, sorrow, excitement, and joy. Not only will this help them to comprehend as they read the lines in repetition, this skill will transfer to their own reading patterns when they read text in other areas.