On the Maine stage

Much ‘meaningful’ learning is occurring as Scarborough first- and fifth-graders  team up to adapt works by Maine authors.

SCARBOROUGH — Thirty-nine schoolchildren, made up in a menagerie of hand-crafted animal costumes, stand in the middle of the Scarborough High School auditorium stage when Grade 5 teacher Patrick Reagan announces the imaginary ship on which they are riding has struck a reef.

“Uh-oh, it’s starting to rock back and forth,” he says, from his director’s perch at the base of the stage, swaying his arms for emphasis.

On cue, the students totter back and forth, first on one foot, then the other. But Reagan, who teaches at Wentworth Intermediate School, is not satisfied. “It’s really rocking!” he prompts. “You’re scared. Ooohhh!“ And the students launch into a chorus of mock screams.

Unfortunately, they’re human screams, which causes Lisa Douglas, a Grade 1 teacher at Blue Point Elementary School, to ask from stage left, “Who’s your animal?” One or two of the younger children check their masks, just to make sure, and then the theater erupts in a wild cacophony of barks and bleats, squeaks and squeals, whinnies, roars and whatever noise it is a 6-year old presumes a frightened ostrich might make.

Then, as Reagan declares the ship to have fully run aground, they all fall down, and the barnyard noises give way to laughter.

The students – 16 from Douglas’ class; 23 from Reagan’s – are rehearsing a scene from “The Circus Ship,” a children’s picture book by Maine author Chris Van Dusen.

The Camden author/illustrator says his book, based on the 1836 sinking of the Royal Tar off Vinalhaven, has been adapted for the stage once before, last fall in a Teensy Weensy Production Class workshop sponsored by the Children’s Museum and Theater of Maine. The Feb. 15 performances by Reagan and Douglas’ students, however, will be the first production before a live audience.

Also adapted that day will be “Little Beaver and the Echo,” by Falmouth author Amy MacDonald. Although Van Dusen has other commitments, MacDonald plans to attend what she joyfully describes as the “Maine premiere” of her book.

“I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they’ve done with it,” she said Monday.

Although schoolchildren adapting and performing the works of Maine authors for the first time in Scarborough is worth noting in its own right, that’s only part of what will happen on stage. The other part, unseen by the audience, is how the show will help student learning. After all, while Shakespeare is famous for writing, “The play’s the thing,” Reagan and Douglas say it’s play itself that’s often the thing that helps students become better readers.

“To me, my personal belief is that there’s so much standardized testing these days, it takes away the fun of experiencing literature,” said Reagan, pointing out that many students seem to do a better job of retaining what they learn while experiencing an activity than when sitting at a desk cramming in data to pass a test.

“This is the kind of thing that is truly meaningful to the kids,” said Reagan. “When you ask them later what they remember, it’s always the plays, not the test.”

There could be something to that theory. Test results for the New England Common Assessment Program released last week by the Maine Department of Education show results to be flat in Scarborough during the past three years. Administered each October, the testing shows 75 percent of Scarborough students in grades 3-8 are proficient in math, up 1 percentage point from the previous two years. Reading results have climbed 1 percent a year during the past three years, with 83 percent of Scarborough students proving proficient in 2011. Meanwhile, writing scores (tests in Scarborough are given only to grades 5 and 8) have dropped, from 72 percent proficient in 2010 to 64 percent in 2011.

The original goal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, was that 100 percent of students test at proficient levels by 2013, or else schools would face punitive measures, but President Obama waived that mandate last fall. Locally, Maine will change how it reports test results in 2014, marking the fourth time measurement models have changed since No Child Left Behindcame online, which, to date, has made results difficult to compare for more than three years in a row.

But while testing models have changed frequently, Reagan’s spring performance workshop has remained a part of his lesson plan for 14 years.

“There’s definitely that pressure to not spend time on that anymore, because over the years there has been more and more high-stakes testing, which takes away from things like this,” Reagan said.

The act of performing helps to cement skills, says Reagan, which might otherwise flutter away as soon as a test is completed.

“It’s experiential leaning,” said Reagan. “The more you do a skill, the more you have a total physical response, the more you internalize it. My biggest thing is, I want kids to step out of their shells and not be afraid to get out there and have a little bit of fun.”

“The academic work doesn’t stop while doing this,” said Douglas. “This project has got students in my class who were not readers to begin reading just from the experience of practicing their lines, because it was so fun and exciting. It’s been very, very motivational and helped reduce the fear of reading, and fear of making a mistake.”

Those fears can take hold before students begin rigorous testing in Grade 3. But, Douglas says, those fears can be mitigated when younger students are introduced to literacy through what she calls “authentic learning” – the year children learn naturally, by doing and imitating.

“Children are not abstract learners, like adults,” said Douglas. “They are concrete learners. They have to see an application for something. It has to have a purpose. By learning lines for a play, the script becomes more than just words on a page. It brings the words to life. Now they see how it all works.”

Essentially, Douglas says, through play, written words are associated with sounds and actions, becoming more than arcane symbols on paper that must be translated.

And that’s not the only useful aspect of theater work.

“With the plays we do each year, the kids really get to be creative to take chances, to learn life skills like speaking in front of people, and practical things they will use as adults, like working in groups with teamwork,” said Reagan.

It’s helped, said Reagan, that the teamwork involved students in different grades.

“We had a wonderful experience making costumes together,” said Douglas. “It was a great mentoring program, especially because a lot of these kids don’t have older brother and sisters.”

“It’s kind of surprising,” agreed Reagan. “You might think the older kids would act out, but when we put them with the first-graders, they really stepped up with mentoring and teaching them, and it turned out they learned a little bit as well in doing so.”

“There’s something very powerful when older students and younger students work together,” said Superintendent George Entwistle. “It’s a very motivating dynamic that serves both age groups well.”

Entwistle says the value of Reagan’s play proves the value of the arts in public education.

“I would like to see us embrace the arts even more so,” he said. “I really hope that we’re not in danger of more cuts. We’ve really hit the tipping point in some critical areas already.”

“I think it’s very, very important to give children expires to the arts at a younger age, because that’s a place of frequent cuts in the school department,” said Douglas.

“To me, it’s a critical piece,” said Reagan. “We’ve had people cut in recent years, and lost a lot of positions in the arts. Hopefully, something like this will show people that we have to stand behind this stuff.”

Although Reagan has adapted children’s books for theater projects each year, the mentoring began last year with kindergartners. This year’s collaboration with first-graders worked out so well, he says, because they are “at an age where they are just getting interested in books.”

Reagan says he discovered this year’s authors while reading to his own young children, and had not realized at first, when picturing the action on stage, that they were by Maine authors.

MacDonald, who has written more than a dozen children’s books, wrote her first one when staying on a New Hampshire pond, after he young son asked her why her voice came back to him from across the pond.

“I reasoned to was easier to write a story than to try and explain the physics of an echo,” she said.

In her book, a young beaver driven to tears by loneliness sets out to find the other creature he hears crying on the other side of a pond.

“It’s a search for friendship, really,” said MacDonald, about her book.

Van Dusen’s book – based on a true story gleaned from an old Down East magazine – also is about friendship, as residents of a coastal Maine village come together to help rescue exotic animals from a wrecked ship just off shore.

“Of course, it has a lot of really cool animals, which the younger kids like, so I think it works on two levels,” said Van Dusen.

To watch Douglas’ first-graders scamper about the stage as monkeys and alligators, while the older children practice their lines as villages, it’s pretty clear Van Dusen is right. But who really got it right, says Douglas, is Reagan.

“I think he has to be highly commended on this and I hope the program will continue,” he says. “He’s one of those teachers kids always remember – that one teacher who stands out.”