City Lit Theater’s Educational Program is dedicated to bringing the vitality and accessibility of the literary imagination to the youth of our community.
This program produces theatrical concert readings of adaptations of relevant literary material to be performed in schools by professional actors. In addition, City Lit offers multi-day workshop sessions in which our teaching artists work with students to adapt literature into scripts that they perform themselves!
Our processes provides students with a well-rounded learning aspect to the literature in their curriculum by bringing the stories to life and connecting the literary themes to the students own lives. Students learn how literature and the theatrical can enrich and benefit each other and experience the beauty and power of the spoken written word.
Real Live Literature is a form of Reader’s Theatre, which is a research-supported method of improving reading fluency. It is a recommended form of “Repeated Guided Oral Reading,” and studies have shown that its use results in dramatic grade-level gains in reading and comprehension skills. Real Live Literature excites children to read a story repeatedly, therefore improving reading fluency and appreciation.
Everything City Lit does emanates from our belief in the literary imagination. Accordingly, we believe that teaching literature through performance provides benefits to students that could not accrue in other ways