Birmingham Primary School classroom teacher and Grade 4 co-ordinator, Kristine Bright, shares her excitement about a new series of play scripts for Middle Primary students that focus on speaking, listening and reading aloud.

When I was invited to trial some of the VoiceWorks illustrated drama scripts, I had no hesitation in accepting. In fact, this was the very type of shared reading material that we had been wanting for some time. There seemed to be a scarcity of good quality texts that purposefully engaged students in speaking and listening.

When my students and I first read these scripts we were all genuinely excited. The design with its eye-catching illustrations had everyone glued to the pages right from the start. We found the colour-coded character names and the illustrated character list really helped us to follow each part and the students felt particularly confident reading out loud and sharing with others.

My own students couldn’t wait for their ‘drama’ sessions and their co-operative group work during reading and performance covered a wide range of earning outcomes. These books simply created their own interest. The students wanted to read them! They sometimes even ignored the bell if it sounded before the session finished!

I found that starting with some of the plays that involved the whole class was an ideal lead into this type of language activity. The Crazy Critters by Canadian Reader’s Theatre specialist Lois Walker and Quick Nick and Slow Jo by author Bill Condon involved the whole class, with easy-to-follow parts and fun rhyming chants. These texts and others, such as the beautiful re-telling of a traditional Italian tale—La Capra Bugiarda (The Goat That Told Lies)—and a radio play version of The Hairy Toe, where students create the sound effects, fitted perfectly into my literacy block.

These scripts are terrific for shared and guided reading, as well as whole-class oral language activities. They also lend themselves to independent reading tasks. I found that my less confident readers felt really empowered by their roles and I was able to allocate parts so that everyone felt important to the outcome. Everybody knew they had to work as part of a team. I was also particularly impressed with the way that language concepts have obviously been purposefully woven into the scripts in such a natural and engaging manner.

The illustrations for these sixteen titles created enormous interest with the students in our shared reading discussions. Each script is illustrated by a different illustrator, with the varied styles and colours proving to be a great talking point.

One of the strengths of this series is the breadth of genres and topics. I found that the three categories—Traditional, Contemporary and ‘Language Play’—provided lots of variety with a well-thought-out and balanced selection of individual themes in each text. I also found that be reading the VoiceWorks scripts, the students wanted to write their own plays, and these stories in play format are an excellent focus for modelled writing.

My students were so motivated by performing the traditional story of Bendemolena in a puppet theatre that a small group of them went off straight away to write their own puppet play!

My favourites include the Readers’ Theatre and participatory scripts that involve class and audience response. We performed some of these plays to the rest of the school at assembly and everyone just loved shouting out loud phrases such as ‘Quick, Nick, quick!’ and ‘Go, Jo, go!’ in a wonderful modern-day parody of the parable of The Hare and the Tortoise.

These illustrated play scripts will definitely enhance a school’s literacy program and fill a long-awaited gap for Middle to Upper Primary school students. VoiceWorks naturally engages all students and provides a genuine reason to focus on spoken language as well as written language.

Review published in Classroom, Issue 3/2001, Scholastic.