Story Drama: Creating Stories Through Role Playing, Improvising, and Reading Aloud

This revised and expanded edition of a popular classic resource for teachers explores constructive ways to use drama and story to engage students in learning through all areas of the curriculum — language arts, social studies, and the arts in education.

Part memoir and part guide, Story Drama offers a compelling chronicle of the developments in drama education over the author's forty-year teaching career. It provides teachers with strategies and techniques for moving students inside the stories they read or experience together, and helps them build community. Presenting proven ways to use all types of stories, each chapter features effective frameworks and workshop lessons that can be easily implemented in any classroom.

A comprehensive approach to using story and drama with children of all ages, the book offers teachers:

• the theoretical background they need to create a powerful story community through drama;
• practical examples of interactive and cooperative role playing with students;
• resources for exploring personal response through all the arts;
• strategies for helping students develop skills as story tellers, story builders and story makers;
• innovative ways to incorporate a variety of drama processes — improvising, role playing, mime, storytelling, enacting, playmaking, reading aloud, writing in role, and performing.

David Booth shows new and experienced teachers alike how to use the power of drama and story to create vibrant learning opportunities for all students.