"Mom, I'm DOOMED!" Literacy Development Through Theatrical Participation

This project began when I heard a story that made my mind turn. The story was about a five- year-old girl who left her glove in the car on a chilly morning before school. Upon reaching the school entrance, she turned to her mother and cried, "Oh no! Mom! I'm Doomed!!" because she neglected to put on one of her gloves (Snow, 2012). Her mother, astonished by her daughter's mature answer, asked her daughter where she had heard that word before. The daughter explained that The Marley brothers told Scrooge this in the production of "A Christmas Carol" that she was participating in at the time. After hearing this story, I began to ponder the impact scripts and theatrical participation could have on a child's literacy skills, especially a child's vocabulary. Being involved in theatre since a very young age, I decided it was time to put her theory into a research project. "Mom, I'm DOOMED!" Literacy Development Through Theatrical Participation sets out to answer three main research questions: (1) How does theatrical participation benefit students' literacy skills? (2) How do scripts enhance students' vocabulary? (3) How do scripts and theatrical participation heighten students' fluency skills? In order to explore these research questions, the researcher created a theatrical workshop to engage students in an authentic theatrical experience. Using a fourth grade reader's theatre script and on-grade-level vocabulary words, I created a six-day workshop to engage students and gather data surrounding her research questions. After the workshop was conducted and data gathered, the results were analyzed for common trends and correlations. Although the results found were minimal, they did show a positive correlation between theatrical participation and students' literacy skills. Although students' data did show improvement in scores, there were no clear findings that could prove theatrical participation is a more effective learning environment than others.