Performance Literacy & Links

Performance Literacy & Links

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Magic of Performance Literacy (Documentary Video,13 minutes, Real Media)

Reading professor and performance poet Nile Stanley, and storyteller, Brett Dillingham work the magic of performance literacy at Riverbend Elementary School, Juneau, Alaska.

Autumn Leaves (Documentary Video, 26 minutes, Real Media)

Storyteller, Brett Dillingham does performance literacy at Stepping Stones Pupil Referral Unit, Cauderdale Council, Halifax, England. The school is for learning and emotionally disabled students who have not succeeded in the mainstream classroom. Watch as challenged children are transformed through storytelling and become engaged in productive language and literacy.

Teaching Tips

Storytelling Minilesson (2.5 minutes, Real Media)

Elise Rose, 4th grader, retells the The Singing Geese (1998) by Jan Wahl and Sterling Brown. An African-American tall tale in which a man shoots a singing goose and takes it home to pluck it and roast it. Just as he is about to carve it, the goose raises its head and sings a song, "La lee loo. Come quilla, come quilla. Bang, bang, bang! Quilla bang."
Experience: Read a folktale picture book .
Reflect: Recall and draw the story events.
Apply: Retell the story in your own words. Use voice, movement and expression.

Feature - Storytelling: I wouldn't Let it Concern Me, by Nile Stanley

Florida Reading Quarterly, Spring 2007
The story is accompanied by a mini-lesson for use in the reading classroom. The Experience, Reflect, and Apply model maximizes learning in this fun and productive lesson.

Feature - Storytelling: Pudge Smoot's Golden Arm, by Nile Stanley (PDF)

Florida Reading Quarterly, Winter 2007
Learn to write and tell the jump tale, a scary story in which the teller uses the dramatic pause followed by a sudden loud outburst to scare the audience and get them to jump out of their seats.

Performance Literacy by Brett Dillingham
http://www.brettdillingham.com/index.cfm

Educators struggle to find ways to engage students in literacy development and content area exploration. Performance literacy is a process of teaching students to perform their own writing-usually stories or poetry. It embraces skills in the two primary areas associated with storytelling: story development, in which students develop the skills to write original stories, poems, and other narrative events; and story delivery, in which students perform their narrative events in engaging, creative ways. Oral language development through telling and retelling stories is the foundation for writing and performing. Through this process students provide an opportunity for parents and community members to see and assess their children performing culturally responsive literacy while conducting themselves in a professional manner.
Abstract from Dillingham, B. (2005, September). Performance Literacy. The Reading Teacher, 59(1), 72-75. doi: 10.1598/RT.59.1.7. Available at http://www.reading.org/publications/journals/rt/v59/i1/abstracts/RT-59-1-Dillingham.html

Performance Literacy & Links

Teaching Tips

Other Links