In the spring of 2005 I was invited to be part of a Reader's Theatre event at IRA, the International Reading Association convention, in San Antonio, Texas. Avi, Richard Peck, Pam Munoz Ryan and I all contributed pieces and the four of us split up the parts, rehearsed for a day with our director, an editor from HarperCollins named Justin Chanda, and the following morning presented each other's work for an audience of nearly 700 teachers. It was astonishing to experience the reaction of our audience. Pam and I played the parts of Bernie and Heidi, in an excerpt of So B. It, with Richard Peck and Avi taking turns doing the narrator's role. Then Avi and Richard played Guy and Buzz, while Pam and I took turns as narrators in some scenes from Regular Guy.

It was very moving to me, to participate in the event, both as an author and as a reader and because so many teachers asked me afterwards whether there was any way they could bring the pieces into their classrooms, I decided to make the scripts available here on my website. All you have to do is download one of the pdfs listed below, print it out, and voila! you’ve got a script . You can adapt any book into a Reader’s Theatre script and there are lots of places on the web that will give you good advice about how to do this. I chose the scenes for my scripts, turned them over to our pros, Avi and Justin Chanda, and after seeing what they did to adapt the Guy and So B. It material, I went on to prepare the other scripts on my own.

I was definitely bitten by the RT bug because in 2006, four of us - Avi, Sharon Creech, Walter Dean Meyers and I got together and decided to form ART, Authors Readers Theatre and take it on the road.  We did eight performances in Season One and are planning many more performances in the future.  For more about ART please visit our website: www.authorsreaderstheatre.com
and to see a DVD of our first performance in Naperville, IL please visit: www.teachingbooks.net/Rtmovie.

If you would like to learn more about Reader’s Theatre, check out the many sites on the web. Here’s one I found particularly helpful:

http://bms.westport.k12.ct.us/mccormick/rt/rthome.htm

If you decide to use my scripts, feel free to divide the parts up differently to suit your needs, my only request is that you have fun! Keep in mind that your presentations will be much more meaningful if the “readers” are familiar with the entire body of work, so it’s a good idea to have copies of the books on hand too. Enjoy!

Pdf’s available for:

Selections from “GUY WIRE” from the Regular Guy series

Selections from “So B. It”

Selections from “Jumping the Scratch”

Selections from “DANGER! BOYS DANCING!” from the Boyds Will be Boyds series