LRU Students Take Learning from the Classroom to the Stage

Students at Lenoir-Rhyne do more then just sit in classrooms and learn from textbooks. They get out in the community, they practice their craft, they experience their lessons. When four current students decided to bring a book to life on stage through their own script they never knew they'd actually get the chance to perform it for over 2,000 area youngsters.

L-R student Randi Duplantis, Michelle Sapanaro, Charity Simmons, Hannah Simmons undertook the project of transforming the book Love, Ruby Lavender by Deborah Wiles into play format. Ms. Wiles will be speaking on campus in April as part of the Little Read program, a countywide literacy program for elementary school students.

The students' project is titled, "Loving Love, Ruby Lavender," and is centered around encouraging children to read and to interpret themes within stories. The group wrote a script that follows four nine-year old girls who are reading Love, Ruby Lavender together. As they read, the friends encounter both "happy" and "sad" passages, talking through them and acting out the story in order to understand it better.

The play conveys the ideas that, first of all, reading is fun and exciting, especially when you read in a group. Secondly, the importance of knowing the entire story, emphasizing why you can't "skip" chapters or just stop when you get discouraged. Also, it presents the theme that anyone can enjoy the stories in the book Love, Ruby Lavender and that with your imagination; any book can be an adventure.

The process of adapting a book into a play was new to the four students, as none had done this before. This new endeavor allowed the students the opportunity to work as a team in creating the play. By highlighting the most important "plot points" and the emotive and moving chapters, the students created a 30-minute children's show that takes kids through the entire story. Wanting readers to able to recognize the scenes and passages being read was a major focus. The result is an 18-page script that moves through the story of Ruby and also the four girls who are reading about her.

With the support of LRU assistant theatre professor Mia Self, the students performed their play for over two hundred enthusiastic elementary students.

These students rise up by tackling the challenge of going above and beyond classroom expectations by creating and performing a play for youngsters.