Projects

Time needed: 23 class periods · 50 minutes · five days a week

Nobody in the room knows what slithy means, so everybody starts even. Five crews each take one stanza of Lewis Carroll's poem and stage it with choral voice, three tableaux, and their own light and sound cues. The whole company bookends the piece with stanzas 1 and 7, which are the same twenty-eight words. By the second time through, the monster is dead and nothing has changed but us.

TableauChoral voiceArticulationNonsense languageLighting designSound designCue callingEnsemble

Essential question

How do we make meaning together?

What you need

• The poem. Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll, 1871, from Through the Looking-Glass. Public domain. Print it as many times as you want.
• Index cards, chart paper, markers. The Word Wall goes up in week 2 and stays up until the last day.
• One clipboard. That clipboard is the Cue Book, and it is the only copy. A student scribe reads it out loud at tech.
• One sword, which could be a student. Props are clarity, not decoration. One costume piece per crew, maximum. The Jabberwock never gets one.
• Lights are optional. I use Par64 LED RGB on a DMX board and students run it. If your room has one switch, you still get the whole design conversation. Ask which color the stanza is, make them defend it, then run the show on sound alone.
• Sound is optional too. Three clips per crew is plenty, and body-made sound usually wins anyway. Thirty voices from the risers is a real Jabberwock.

How it runs

• Week 1, days 1 to 5. Company and collaboration. Agreements first. Then Yes-And, Yes-But, and Yes-Instead, and an articulation ladder for lips, teeth, tongue, and jaw. Groups write tongue twisters, revise them to be harder, trade them, then audition every one and vote. The three that win become THE THREE, with a gesture each. That is the warm-up for the rest of the module. Students wrote it, so students own it.
• Week 2, days 6 to 10. Tableau craft, then first contact. Levels, frozen action, one clear emotion. Then sound before text: eyes closed, no paper, I read stanza 1 twice. Show me slithy with your body. Only then do they see the words. At the Nonsense Word Summit each crew argues for two definitions and posts them to the Word Wall, and Humpty Dumpty's explanation from Carroll comes in after they have already committed to their own.
• Week 3, days 11 to 15. Stanza crews. Read it three ways, whisper, shout, slow. Plain-English retell with no nonsense words allowed. Voice lab on pace, pitch, volume, and punch, with one deliberate choice per line. Build tableau 1, then 2 and 3, then the transitions between them: melt, snap, ripple, travel.
• Week 4, days 16 to 20. Feedback and design. Rough share, all five crews, no stopping, then I noticed and I wondered. Color-Mood Auction for lights and a sound lab for cues, every choice logged in the Cue Book with a reason. Whole company builds stanzas 1 and 7. First full stitch with no tech, then repair the two roughest seams.
• Week 5, days 21 to 23. Tech, dress, perform. Cue-to-cue with a student cue caller and a student board operator. Standby means get ready, GO means go, nobody moves on standby. Dress with props and full tech and nobody stops. Perform. Circle reflection, then Word Wall retirement: which definition stuck?

Where it gets hard

Two places, both by design. The first is stanza 7. Identical words to stanza 1, and fourth graders will deliver it identically unless the difference becomes the entire lesson. The second is the seams. Crews rehearse their own stanza beautifully and then have no idea who they hand off to, which is why day 20 is nothing but handoffs. [Add whatever else bites you the first time you run it.]

Games that carry it

Ensemble and fast decisions: Upsies Downsies, Boom Slap Grab, Splat, Zombie Tag, The West Wind Blows, Hitchhiker, Kitty in the Corner, Bunny Bunny, Wink Murder, Spaghetti. Articulation: Bippity Bippity Bop. Frozen bodies and levels: Statue, Impossible Sculptures, Tableau Telephone, Slow Motion Race. Cues: Clap Pass, which is also where the word cue gets taught, and Jabberwocky Chase on the day the company builds the bookend stanzas.

How we give notes

I noticed names a choice you actually saw. A level, a transition, a vocal move. I wondered offers a possibility, not a verdict. "Good job," "I liked it," and "It was funny" are not notes. Those are noises.

What students turn in

All of it small, all of it on index cards, half sheets, or clipboards. No seat work.

• Word Wall card: one nonsense word, drawn or written as what it sounds like it means.
• The crew's tongue twister, with the hardest word circled.
• Crew card naming tableau 1 in exactly three words. The dramaturg writes it.
• A Cue Book line: light color, sound cue, and the reason. "We chose ___ because our stanza feels ___."
• Self-assessment in two parts, six statements, scored not yet / starting / yes. Part 1 goes in at dress rehearsal, part 2 after the performance, and they compare the two. Students score, I confirm.
• The performance.

Standards

Illinois Arts Learning Standards, 4th grade theatre. Creating: TH:Cr1.1.4, TH:Cr2.1.4, TH:Cr3.1.4. Performing: TH:Pr4.1.4, TH:Pr5.1.4, TH:Pr6.1.4. Responding: TH:Re7.1.4, TH:Re8.1.4, TH:Re9.1.4. Connecting: TH:Cn10.1.4.

Time needed: Roughly 15 to 18 class periods

Students write an original script, build a foley kit out of whatever is on the shelving wall, and perform it live. The audience closes their eyes.

Original scriptsSound designVocal characterization

What you need

• Assortment of things that can make noise for foley. This is where it gets fun. Crumpled paper, markers tapping the floor, water being poored from one bottle to another, etc. Everything can make noise if your believe in yourself
• Story planning sheets Anything that helps the students plan a plot
• 4 to 5 random images. These are story starters. I like to find some that look generally creepy (dark forest, long dim hallway, etc.
• A chromebook, or someway to access music. I really like bensound.com. You can search by genre and mood
• Computer and a speaker To play a radio drama example. I use The Twilight Zone's Night Call. It's just creepy enough without being TOO scary.

How it runs

• Week 1, days 1 to 5. Company, collaboration, Intro to Radio Drama. Agreements first. Some drama games to help the class connect. On day 2, I go over what radio drama is and a quick history then we all listen to an example. I use Night Call from the Twilight zone. Youtube has a radio drama version. The students love it, it's a little creepy, so I allow anyone who needs to take a break. We stop and start it periodically to discuss how the elements of radio drama Music, Narration, Sound Effects and Dialogue are used in to tell the story. The radio drama usually takes another day to finish listening. Day 4 and 5 we learn about foley artists. Again, youtube has a bunch of great clips of how foley artists make sounds from random things.
• Week 2, days 6 to 10. Exploring foley through sound scapes. In groups of 4 to 5, the students are given a random environment (rain forest, department store, busy cafe, etc) and they make a list of sounds that would indicate someone is there. Then they get to explore the drama room for things that could possible create that sound. This is pretty fun as they have mostly free reign to explore. I have a few "off limits" or "ask me first" shelves, but for the most part, it's a free for all. The rules are, they can't make the sound in a way that would break the item, and they have to put it back where they found it. For the next day or so, they explore and rehearse then they perform their foley for the class while we close our eyes. I let the group that is performing tell us the location first, then get audience can respond with what they imagined based on that location.
• Week 3, days 11 to 15. Images to story. I present 5 images around the room and group the students up. Each group starts with an image and writes down words or phrases that come to mind as they look at the image. This is a good place for chart paper. They have about 2 minutes, then I give a signal to rotate to the next image. We do this until they return to their orginal image. After everyone has seen and thought about them all, they get to choose their groups based on which image or images inspired them most. I don't specifically cap the number of people per group, but I do mention to the students that if a group feels too big, and their are too many ideas, it could be beneficial to split up a larger group into 2 smaller groups. Then they begin outlining what they want to have happen in the story. Once they've got a solid plot mountain diagram, they begin writing the script.
• Week 4, Script writing and rehearsing. Paper and pencil, chromebooks, whatever works for you. If it's paper and pencil, it will help if you make copies for each group member. Once a group has a script, they mark the spots where they will put their foley and begin finding things in the room to make those sounds. Once foley is found, I introduce the site www.bensound.com where they can choose the music that would best enhance the mood of their story. From there, it's rehearse rehearse rehearse.
• Week 5, Rehearse and perform. Each group gets to perform their script for the rest of the class.

What students turn in

• Finished Scripts. Labeled with foley and music cues.
• Reflection Sheets. One per student. What went well? If you could do it again, what would you do differently? Why did you choose the song you used? What was your favorite part of the project and why? What is one piece of advice you'd give the students who will do this next year?

Time needed: [number] class periods

Third graders find out that a show takes more than actors. Every student rotates through real jobs. They run the light board themselves, on real cues, in front of an audience of their classmates.

Stage managerLighting operatorCostume designerSet crewPerformerPlot structure

What you need

Coming Soon

How it runs

Coming Soon

What students turn in

Coming Soon

Time needed: ten weeks, five days a week

Built from nothing. Students write it, cast it, design it, and run it for an audience. They build the suspects, the timeline, and the red herrings themselves.

DevisingPlot structureOriginal scriptsProduction management

What you need

• Printer. To make copies of a script.
• A murder mystery game Teachers pay teachers has an abundance of them.
• Anything you beg, borrow or steal to make the set, props, and costumes

How it runs

Check the slides of our daily agendas.
Murder_Mystery_Unit_-_Fall_2026_Agendas.pptx by Jeremy Guidry

What students turn in

• Reflection Sheets. One per student. What went well? If you could do it again, what would you do differently? Why did you choose the song you used? What was your favorite part of the project and why? What is one piece of advice you'd give the the students who will do this next year?