Readers' Theater plays are an excellent way to get students to revisit the text of a novel - and have considerable value in themselves for improving reading and comprehension. For some of Tim Rasinski's research, click here.

Each play of the free plays below calls for 4 or 5 student actors, someone to do sound effects, and about 40 minutes of preparation time. The actual performance time for a script is about five minutes, but if students decide to make an audio recording of their performance you'll have to allow much time for re-takes.

Two new plays now available
We've commissioned writer Joan Axelrod-Contrada to create two new readers' theater plays based on Edge novels. Both are free downloads. Outrage is based on the novel by Tony Varrato. Click here for the file. Turf War is based on the novel by Alex Kropp. Click here for the file.

Listed below are the scripts that we used for testing to produce our book Readers Theater Plays. That book offers performing notes and a special layout to enhance student performance. Nonetheless, thousands of teachers and students have performed these Word and Adobe versions with great success. Teachers have the permission of High Interest Publishing to download and reproduce any of these scripts for classroom use, all other rights remain with HIP. These scripts are MS Word files, approximately 50 K each:

These popular scripts are available as Adobe PDF files:

For an audio sample of students performing Student Narc, click here.  For a marking rubric, click here.