CHORAL SPEAKING SCRIPTS CATALOG
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Choral Speaking Scripts, Younger
Choral Speaking Scripts, Older
Choral Speaking Teacher's Guide
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WHAT IS CHORAL SPEAKING/READING?
Unlike Readers Theater (which is meant to be read), "Choral Speaking" requires a group of students to orally interpret and recite from memory.
(NOTE: What's wrong with the concept of "Choral Reading" (reading rather than memorizing)? Nothing at all. If that works best for you and your students, it works for me)!
In my grandmother's day, Choral Speaking was all the rage! When I was a little girl, I remember attending many wonderful Choral Speaking concerts at grandma's K-12 one-room schoolhouse in Ohio. I also remember that when grandmother died, our family received many many cards and letters from past students, now grown up, who remembered her as THE BEST TEACHER THEY EVER HAD!
What happened to Choral Speaking? For years it seemed to have disappeared from our elementary schools. Choral Speaking gave way to more "modern" activities: creative drama, play building, cooperative grouping, video watching. A recent online search of the words "choral speaking" brought very few listings.
Thank goodness for Canadian Speech Festival organizers who still include Choral Speaking as a viable category, and collect suitable Choral Speaking pieces and materials for use in the classroom. A number of years ago I was asked to adjudicate a Speech Festival in Nelson, British Columbia and found, to my surprise, that Choral Speaking was alive and well!
Later, my husband and I conducted a workshop for British Columbia Catholic Teachers in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. We started out doing a Readers Theatre Workshop and, by popular request, ended up discussing the incredible benefits of Choral Speaking. The teachers were so enthusiastic that my interest was rekindled. When I got home, I sat down at my computer and began re-formatting some of my rhyming scripts into Choral Speaking pieces. You'll find these and more in our online catalogue.
The scripts or speaking pieces in my collections belong to YOU. Please change them in any way to suit your individual needs. Words and phrases may need fine-tuning to accommodate a particular reading level. Assignment of printed speaking or reading sections/lines may not be right for your group or situation. Please feel free to invent, create, edit, imagine, omit, add, and change. The purpose of this collection is to make materials available to teachers who want to motivate ORAL READING and CHORAL SPEAKING/READING. I am not interested in protecting my pride or my copyright! I am interested in helping promote a love of ORAL LANGUAGE.
Sincerely, Lois Walker
PS: Teaching reading? Can "Choral Reading" be used as a teaching tool to model fluency and expression?
Yes! Students read the script text chorally. (This may vary some because, sometimes, groups or individuals are selected to read various parts or characters from the story). With teacher joining in, children are provided a model for fluency and expression. This variation works best with plays, predictable text, text with refrains, and text with lots of dialog.
