Reader's Theatre

My class is performing a play based on the children's book "And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon." It's a comedy based on famous nursery rhymes and stories like Little Boy Blue, Little Miss Muffet, The Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk etc. The story centers around the characters from the following nursery rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

In the story cow, cat and dog are searching for their missing friends the dish and the spoon who ran away together, like they always do, but never came back.

The kids are doing an awesome job with it. Some even change their voices to fit with the character. I have one who chose a sinister Hispanic voice for the big bad wolf and another chose a high pitched mischievous voice for the spider. They are really paying attention to their lines and making sure they are portraying the mood. I have to say, there might be some future actors in my group from what I've seen. They will be performing their play in front of some other fourth grade classrooms and I think I might invite some lower grade classes as well. Who knows, maybe I'll make it a tradition for my classes to perform a reader's theatre in the future years. That'll be something to look foward to from Hernandez's Heroes.