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If you were a counselor you could use these tactics to help a kid who was going through something tough at home you could show possible examples of how a better way to improve the situation.

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I am a 6th grade teacher and I teach ecosystems for our science rotation.  I have in the past had the students write about a day in the life of something in the biome they chose to make.  I will definitely be having them write a play about it instead.  I think that would be so creative and they would love that.

I could also use playwriting in our Greek unit to have them make up a myth on their own.  That would be great fun!

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I teach first and second grade, and I am going to teach fables this year. After studying our fable unit, students could write and perform their own fables. There would be a set structure (short, talking animals, obvious conflict, lesson learned) that would be great for scaffolding the unit for all students.

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This month I will be teaching about the original 13 colonies in my fifth grade class. I have a lot of articles about how they interacted with each other and the American Indians. I think it would be a very useful tool to help them think about how the new immigrants needed help from each other and the American Indians to get what they want, a new beginning, and survival. I plan to use the tools I learned to have them write scripts and use finger puppets to share newly learned information about these settles and how they began to set up trade and settlements.

I also always teach about holidays around the world in December. I would love to get students writing scripts and acting our plays about what these celebrating look like rather than simply presenting a bunch of facts about them as I have done in years past.

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I teach 1st grade and playwriting could go with a lot of Reading Literature standards. Currently we are focusing on identifying characters, setting, and plot of a story. Playwriting would be a great extension for those students who have mastered identifying these story elements. Playwriting would allow these students to take their thinking from identifying to creating.

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I want to add that I used to do a Code Club and I once did an activity where we planned out their dream video game that they wanted to make, so we made characters and thought about what their goals were and what they would say, and I think this course would have really helped me teach the kids because I could have explained things a lot simpler and made a script that they could use for their characters.

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One option is to incorporate music and have kids do a sort of musical style play. Maybe they could write a play based on a song or sing a short rhyme/song within their play. Another option is to take well known characters and write a play about them, similar to the Cinderella example above.

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I teach 6th grade in an elementary setting, which means we are always strapped for time to get through material. I love how play writing integrates core standards together such as ELA and Science or Social Studies. I am looking forward to using it in my classroom. I want to have my students use tableau for the different civilizations and eras we study to help them understand what daily life was like for individuals there. I also am would love my students to create their own scenes for the different planets and how the interact. I also love the gingerbread man and am looking forward to using this when we talk about conflict, especially internal conflict which is sometimes hard to grasp. I love the finger puppets and would love to give them as an option for presentations. We have a high ESL populations and this is such a great tool to help them gain confidence in public speaking.

This was such a fun coarse and I am excited to implement the tools in it!

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I teach 2nd grade and we are currently getting ready to read a fable about a bear and chipmunk. I would love to use the idea about each student being a part of the setting. We also connect this unit to writing fables. I would assign a partner and a moral and let them talk about their story.. My students work with a partner and pick characters for their fable. They would make puppets for these characters. Meet again with their partner and then act out their story. After this, they could go to their desk and write their fable down.

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At the public library branch I work at, there's a club for teens to engage with social justice issues.  Many times the teens are nervous to interact with the community - for example, they might be nervous to ask a business to hang a poster there.  We could use role on the wall or improvising using different ways of speaking to imagine how a scenario might go and gather ways to approach it.

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I teach fourth grade. I could use playwriting to support social studies. We learn about mountain men that came through Utah and tall tales. We can write plays about different mountain men and the experiences they had while trail blazing and exploring.

We could write plays about our SEL units such as empathy, skills for listening, resolving conflicts, and calming down. Characters could be dealing with different problems and we can explore ways to solve those problems using good social skills.

We could write plays about the structures and functions of animals and plants. Characters could be different animals or plants that have unique characteristics that help them survive in their environment.

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I teach 5th grade, and I think using playwriting to make social studies more fun and engaging would be great! Our Social Studies Core focuses on American History. There are so many fun things that could be improvised, tableau- ed, etc. Things such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party, Voting for President, etc. There are so many options.

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In our public library, we also do not follow a curriculum. However, we often integrate lessons and activities such as playwriting into our reading programs and other library activities. I would like to incorporate some of these ideas into either a reading program or one of our writing programs. Students would be able to choose a topic that interests them (current topics, fairy tales, history, etc.), research it using library resources, and then create their own project. I would have them write a play; developing their own characters, conflict, plot, props, etc. After completing their play, they could get their families or friends to help them create a live recording of their play and submit it to our Library.

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I am currently teaching online which always has me looking for creative ways for students to do assignments. I could use the Playworks in all areas of my teaching. In Science we learn Ecosystems, so I could have students improvise certain scenarios that they would find in an ecosystem and allow those abiotic and biotic factors to have a voice.

We could incorporate Playworks into math word problems involving ratios. I also teach Ancient Civilizations and I cannot think of a better way to teach them than to have students act out scenes from these ancient civilizations.

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I teach first grade and we touch on comparing and contrasting stories, I love the idea of reading a bunch of the same story and then having the students act out their version. We do this usual in December so we could use the different stories of the Ginger Bread Man! There is even a ginger bread girl story out there.

I also really like using this to solve classroom problems and make a better classroom community. We can act out how we should line up, what to do if we don't know what to do, or how we follow the rules. Put in in a book and we can do this play a lot during the year if we forget.

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I teach 4th grade. My students are learning about character traits in plays this year. This obviously lends itself to reading plays and writing plays.

After doing a unit on character traits in existing plays and reading scripts to know how plays are written I could use the information from this PD to have my students create their own scripts. They could work on the scenario, the setting, the characters and their personalities, and the skill of writing a play using proper script writing etiquette.

Students in my class are learning Second Steps and learning about empathy and how to have compassion. They can use this information to help create their characters and to develop well-rounded situations in their plays.

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I love the idea of using playwriting to support my instructional units!  I teach first grade and one thing that we work on all year is beginning, middle, and end with supporting details.  I think that playwriting helps students understand these concepts as they bring their stories to life!  I would also use playwriting to support the learning of time and clocks.  They could write stories about different parts of the day.

In science, we talk about different animals.  We discuss where they live, how their bodies help them move, and what they like to eat.  It would be fun to do playwriting with animals and discuss how they behave and what their habitat is like.  We could learn more about predators this way, as well.

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I really like the idea of reinforcing story elements through these lessons! We spend a lot of time discussing characters, setting, conflict, plot, climax, and resolution. I think that students can demonstrate their understanding through the playwriting lessons and they may possibly even do better than if they were just reading a story and identifying these pieces.

In 4th grade science at the end of the quarter we talk about brightness of stars because of their distance. I think it would be fun for students to do an improvisation of different stars and talking about how close or far they actually are from each other.

In social studies we cover Utah history. This would be very great to use especially when we discuss minority groups like the Native Americans or Chinese railroad workers. I think it would help them understand the perspectives and feelings of these groups that they may not have considered before.

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In kindergarten we will be learning about spiders. After learning some key concepts about spiders it would be fun for my students to act out creating a spider habitat with desks and yarn. The other characters would be insects that get caught in the spider's web. The spider could have a predator try to capture them, like a bird or a child. This would bring the curriculum to life before we lead into our writing about spiders.

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This year my students will be learning about the parts of a story.  Playwriting would be a fabulous way that we could learn about each of these parts.  We could define what each part is, such as the setting, the characters, the plot, and the ending.  It would also work with their comprehension of key details in a story for beginning, middle, and end.  One other way to use playwriting is for writing complete sentences with correct capitalization, spacing between words, and ending punctuation that would show how a character is feeling.  Playwriting would also work in describing habitats for animals in varying settings for animals such as the desert, wetlands, forest, etc.

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We will learn different culture in Christmas and how they celebrate it. We will divided into different group and write down the detail in the poster, then every group will be presenting in front of the class. This year, they will play how the people act in the Christmas time.

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One of the favorite places we visit in 6th grade ancient civilizations is Ancient Egypt. As we learn about Ancient Egypt and other civilizations, we also read the fairy tales from there, and compare it to the recent fairy tales that we are familiar with. I would love to do a play regarding these fairy tales, specifically the Cinderella Tale from Egypt, since it was the first known tale of its kind. After reading, I can only imagine the fun the kids would have with improvisation and character development of these ancient characters, and bringing a modern flair to an ancient tale.

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We learn about cultures and our community.  We could do tableaus of people in our community and what they think.  Then we can take that and create a play about the characters from our communities.  We also learn about other cultures.  We could explore the climate and weather of that area and create characters who would live there.  We could use what we learn about their culture to educate our character building and plot.

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I teach 5th grade and we are going to be learning about ecosystems. What I like about this is I could have my students choose two specific ecosystems and have them act out how the two systems interact with each other.

Students could think of a dialogues of what the objects in that ecosystem might say to each other if they actually could talk. They could describe ways how things help and  don't help that environment survive.

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We teach weather in our science unit. I think that it would be a good idea to use plays to show the kids a better visual of the water cycle. For example, we could have a student be a cloud and show how it rains with another student who could be precipitation.

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When I taught Kindergarten I found that reading different versions of a story helped the students see that a story doesn't have to be set one way. For example, we could read different versions of The Three Little Pigs. We would use the different versions to talk about main components of writing plays such as character, plot, setting, etc. This would allow the students to see how stories can change such as the version where the big bad wolf is the 'good' character. Then, together as a class we could write our own version and act it out. For the younger students I would probably use finger puppets so all the students could participate in acting it out while helping making our own play come to life.

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I work at a public library.  This year our Summer Reading Program theme was "Imagine a Story."  I love the idea of having participants imagine a story by creating a play based on a fairy tale, but then using their imaginations to include some obstacles/twists that change the original story.  And then, as a way to bring those stories to life, the children could perform them using a fun set and simple props.

This is just one example of using playwriting in a public library setting.  Other fun ideas could include writing holiday-themed scripts and turning them into a Readers' Theater that they could perform for their parents, taking the main characters from popular books and writing a script that uses all of those characters (scripts could then be displayed in the library for patrons to read when they visit), or even creating little scenarios (i.e. a meteorologist is outside delivering a live weather report for T.V., and the weather happens to change dramatically from one extreme to another) for them to write a play about (those scenarios could include nonfiction themes as well).

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My second grade students are learning about continents/oceans in social studies, rainforests/habitats/animal characteristics in science, and narration/dialogue in writing. These topics go together seamlessly when thinking about playwriting.

Because I only have three students, I imagine that each of my students can write their own stories and cast their classmates. I want us to devote time to each of their stories and act them out as a class. OR, we can create a story together, each as our own imaged character/animal.

Another idea I have is to create a different story based on each continent. With each continent as a setting, my students would select an animal and we could explore these continents from their animal's perspective. We could brainstorm conflicts together and improvise from there!

In regard to integrating writing standards, I would emphasize written dialogue and explicitly teach how to use quotation marks.

Lastly, I plan to purchase a set of finger puppets for my students. This could be a morning center, writing center, play choice, social-emotional role play activity, etc.

I'm so eager to get started!

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Comment from Amy Burkinshaw, Oct 16, 2020

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Comment from Amy Burkinshaw, Oct 16, 2020

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In fifth grade my students are learning about American history. Really any historical time period could be supported through playwriting. More specifically, the American revolution, the Constitutional Convention, the Civil War, American expansion, etc. could be enhanced as students research and learn the points of view of different groups or people involved in each event

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In my opinion there is not enough emphasis put on fiction writing in the upper elementary core. Teaching students about character, setting, and plot and discussing how authors have used these in the books we read in class (or in television shows) can help students pick these things out on their own, and then incorporate them into their own writing.

One thing I have done is to allow students to write and perform a reader's theater piece. Students come up with a conflict and then create characters who would be most impacted by this conflict; those who have the most to lose and the most to gain. They try to create two (or more) compelling sides and then push the conflict to the point of absurdity. Adding humor in this way--without going overboard--is sometimes a challenge, but the audience is very forgiving, and the students love to perform in one-another's productions.

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I am a dual-immersion teacher. This month we will read a story about an old lady, her cats, and some kids living nearby. After we read the story, my students can change the story into a play and perform in groups. During the rewriting and performing, my students will interact with the new words and sentence structures as well as better understand the story.

Last year, during the week before Christmas, my students and I rewrote The Gingerbread Man story. We had lots of fun and practiced the language. The students wanted to do it again and again even when no audiences were present. I feel we can do more story to play activities or start to write our own stories.

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Comment from Natalee Wexels, Oct 16, 2020

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Comment from Natalee Wexels, Oct 16, 2020

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I teach 5th grade, and our Social Studies Core concentrates on American History.  I think it would be really fun to have the students participate in and act out some of the more famous events in our history; such as the Boston Tea Party, the Signing of the Declaration of Independence; Columbus discovering America, etc.

We also have the 2nd Steps lessons that we participate in all year long.  This is another opportunity for them to act scenario's out and think about what they might say in that situation a long with how they would feel and the other person would feel.

I see many opportunities for exploring theater in the classroom using these techniques.

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I currently have my students create narratives with our ecosystem unit. But I love the idea of having them create it in a play form since we so often do the "traditional writing".
I also use narrative writing with my students in our studies of Egypt. We usually read the Egyptian Cinderella story and then students follow a rubric to create their own Egyptian fairy tales, based on known fairy tales. This would work very well to transition to a play that could be performed.