Books Vs. Scripts - theatrical elements and how to translate a story into a script.

For our next lesson, we wanted to get moving on the students creating their fairy tale scripts for the Arts Night at the Mabel.  We went back to an old class format of presenting a short power point presentation to lay out elements visually before moving forward.
Before we got to the Power point, I did spend some time with the students looking at the difference between how a story book is written, and how a play is written.

The students caught on to this quickly - the idea that in a story book, "He said" or "She said" is important for us to know who is talking -but completely unnecessary in a script - the same with describing actions (except in stage directions) In a story we tell what is happening, in a play we show what is happening.

We then went on to review all of the different elements that have to come together for a play to work - both on stage and off:
Script
Director
Stage Manager
Lighting
Costumes
Set Design
Sound Design
Actors
etc...

Students were then put into groups of three and given their playwright hats, and got to work with a book and readers theater version of the story - they could fracture the story if they wanted, but they had to create a script that their classmates could use to perform the play.

This was fairly challenging for most groups - there were plenty of ideas, but less willingness to compromise at first. However, as the teachers and I made our way around to each group, we were able to get most groups rolling on their first few lines... Many of the students were doing a great job of keeping elements like lighting, sound, and costumes in mind as they were writing - which was really wonderful to see!  

Playwrights in their writing berets!