BRINGING CLASSICS TO LIFE 

SUMMER SCHOOL PROGRAM

A Summer School Solution that Children Love Attending and that Teachers Love to Teach

The Bringing Classics to Life Summer Program merges reading instruction with theatre arts to help children in grades K-8 improve their reading skills while falling in love with the world of stories.

Schools can offer the program remotely, in a classroom, and via hybrid instruction. The program works equally well in all three settings.

OVERVIEW

Students read and discuss play adaptations of classic fairy tales, fables, folk tales, tall tales, historical fiction, poetry and novels. With a teacher’s guidance, students learn to read with accuracy, fluency and expression. They learn to use punctuation to pace and modulate their reading. They become adept at reading sentences with a wide range of structures, including sentences with unfamiliar vocabulary and phrases that may belong to a different period or English-speaking culture.

 In the process, students

• refine their decoding skills

• build fluency and automaticity

• learn to read with appropriate expression, volume and clarity

• broaden their Tier 2 vocabulary

• deepen reading comprehension

• practice answering multiple-choice questions

• practice writing short-response questions

Each day targets a specific Common Core standard and related skill. Teachers are provided with a daily lesson plan that supports student fluency, comprehension and vocabulary development. Since many students need support with decoding well into middle school, lesson plans address this need as well. Students absorb their teacher’s instruction and feedback in the context of a meaningful and enjoyable activity: the dramatic reading of a play. When students practice their lines in the play for homework, they are internalizing the skills the teacher has taught. Students make significant strides as readers and grow in confidence and positive orientation toward reading. How do we know that students truly enjoy our plays? Many of them practice reading the plays in their free time with their siblings, parents, and friends for fun; delighting in the freedom to play any role they want.

DAILY ASSESSMENTS

At the end of each lesson, students are assigned a daily quiz with a mix of multiple choice and short responses. This daily quiz provides us with data on the students’

• comprehension

• acquisition of the target skill

• proficiency in the target Common Core standard

• ability to answer multiple choice questions effectively

• ability to write proficient short responses that are sufficiently detailed and relevant to the target question

And, of course, this daily assessment provides practice for state exams, giving students support in parsing question language, using strategy of elimination to isolate potential answers and exercising judgment in finding the best answer.

FURTHER READING

After reading a play, students are encouraged to read the story in its original form and shown how to access the original story online, wherever possible. For our New York City-based schools, we facilitate students’ acquisition of a digital library card and show them how to access digital books available through the public library. This enables them to seamlessly connect their reading in the program to further reading on the same topic, creating a virtuous circle of in-class reading inspiring voluntary reading in the student’s free time.

PROGRAM COMPONENTS

• Bringing Classics to Life for summer school provides:

  • Professional development for teachers in the program’s methodology

  • All reading materials, including plays based on classic novels, legends, myths, fairy tales, mysteries, poems and more.

  • Formative and summative assessments

  • Daily assessments that provide both quantitative and qualitative data.

  • Collaborative reading on a daily basis

  • Daily lesson plans

  • Further reading recommendations for every play and topic

  • A summary report for the school on student performance from start to end of summer school.

SAMPLE PACING

The program is designed to meet the needs of students in K-8. Schools may select the plays, genres, titles and topics they prefer from our library of over 50 plays. We work with schools to tailor their summer plays program to align the summer program to their curriculum. Play selections may give students a running start on topics or stories they will read in the next academic year—or they may help students consolidate their skills and knowledge from the year prior. The sample pacing below shows the range of plays, genres and topics covered by the program for a 5-week summer session.

COMMON CORE STANDARD ALIGNMENT

Every lesson plan and daily assessment targets a Common Core Standard in Reading. In the course of the summer session, students will receive daily instruction and independent practice across the major Common Core Reading standards for their grade; ensuring that they begin the new school year as stronger readers and thinkers.

CORE KNOWLEDGE ALIGNMENT

There are over 50 plays in the program; each of them are aligned to the Core Knowledge Curriculum in the grade for which they are assigned. Overall, the program acquaints students with classic stories in a wide range of genres, periods, and styles. As a result, students emerge from the program able to make much richer text to text connections and with a much broader bank of general knowledge. The program specifically encourages students to read the original versions of the stories, whenever possible.

A WORLD OF STORIES

Our plays reflect the multicultural world we live in. Not only do the plays reflect a wide range of cultures and geographies, but all visual representations of our plays’ characters resemble the diverse population of our nation.

Over 200 schools in 40 states and over 8 countries use our plays to enrich ELA instruction, turn reluctant readers into avid readers, and broaden students’ repertoires of classic fairy tales, legends, myths, fables, folk tales, mysteries, adventure novels, poems, historical fiction, short stories, novels and more.

BRING THIS PROGRAM TO YOUR SCHOOL

If you would like to bring this program to your school, please fill out the form below. We will be in touch shortly!