Playwriting is an exciting part of the fifth grade language arts curriculum. Every fifth grader writes a play during the year and submits it to the annual Philadelphia Young Playwrights' contest.  We start the playwriting process in November, and students write a full first draft by the end of January, when we begin in class staged readings. Through playwriting students find their voices as writers, really understand the concept of audience, and appreciate revision as an essential part of the writing process.

 The staged reading (an in class performance of the play with script in hand) allows the students see their play come to life, and see what works and what doesn't. At the start of the staged reading, the playwright has a chance to ask his or her classmates to look for specific aspects with which he/she would like help. For instance, the playwright might ask to come up with ideas to strengthen the main conflict or to make characters more distinct. At the end of the staged reading, the playwright leads a feedback session with classmates to get ideas for revising the play. The playwrights use feedback from their staged reading and from an individual conference with a playwright from Philadelphia Young Playwrights to revise their plays.

Our culminating event of our playwriting unit is a playwrights' festival during which we perform three of the students' plays (a sampling of all of the wonderful plays written) with every fifth grader participating either as an actor, playwright, director, publicist, or costume/ set designer. This is a wonderful opportunity for students to discover new talents and work collaboratively with their classmates.

Final drafts of the students' plays are due in April and are submitted to the Philadelphia Young Playwrights contest. First place winner's plays are performed by actors at various theaters in Philadelphia. This year we have three first place winners: Isiah Powell-Taylor,  Henry Centeno, and  Danielle Yampolsky. Second and third place winners will be announced in the coming week.

The first place winning plays will be performed (free admission) at the Art Alliance at 251 South 18th Street, Philadelphia. Isiah's play Catnapped and Henry's play The Search for a Frown will be performed on Saturday, November 7th at 11 a.m. Danielle's play Falling Apart will be performed in the spring, date to be announced soon.  

I encourage you to go to see as many of the first place winning plays this year (Penn Charter's and other winning schools' plays) as you can. The complete schedule will be uploaded as an attachment at the bottom of this page as soon as it is announced later this month.