Nysmith Makes Reading Fun

“They can’t make me pack my baseball mitt or my I LOVE DINOSAURS sweatshirt or my cowboy boots. They can’t make me pack my ice skates, my jeans with eight zippers, my compass, my radio, or my stuffed pig. My dad is packing. My mom is packing. My brothers Nick and Anthony are packing. I’m not packing. I’m not going to move,” shouted a student! No, this isn’t a student storming around because they’re moving away, it’s one of Mrs. Kaufman’s Second Graders performing his lines from Alexander, who's not (Do you hear me? I mean it!) Going to move by Judith Viorst, to the Kindergarten students. Second Graders in Mrs.Kaufman’s Language Arts class have been eagerly awaiting and practicing for their Readers Theatre performance, a performance where they get to read a book and perform a skit for the Kindergartners from two books of their choosing.

Prior to their Reader’s Theatre performance the students read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, they listened to the story from a writers’ perspective so they could write their own stories afterwards. “The students were able to choose between writing a story about the best day ever or the worst day ever. They wrote a draft and worked on making revisions and edits, and they’ll be typing their finals in their computer class and adding pictures to their stories,” Mrs. Kaufman. The students had been practicing their performance for over a week. “The kids were really excited for this performance, every day they would walk into class and ask if today was the day they were finally going to perform,” said Mrs. Kaufman. “Reading to the Kindergarteners was fun but I was also nervous because I had to read in front of a big crowd, but once they started laughing at the funny parts of the story I didn’t feel nervous anymore,” exclaimed a student.

Giving the Second graders a chance to read and perform in front of their younger peers allows them to create a bond with one another. They get excited to see their reading buddies in the hallways and at recess, and it also gets the younger kids excited about going into Second grade. At Nysmith we encourage a strong sense of community, not only between our teachers and our students, but also between our students and one another.