In celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, I adapted Richard Michelson's book As Good As Anybody, illustrated by Raul Colón, for reader's theater. This majestically told and seriously illustrated picture book tells the parallel stories of a young Martin Luther King Jr., who grows up observing the oppression of black people in the U.S.A. and then devotes his life to ending oppression for all, and a young Abraham Herschel, who grows up observing the oppression of Jewish people in Europe and then similarly devotes his life to ending oppression. The book utterly engaged the 15 or so fourth-graders in my audience. While they needed clarifications on some essential points (Student: "So....is that Abraham Lincoln they're talking about?" Me: "Well....no."), our discussion of prejudice, justice, and activism was rich--students shared memories of going to Selma, visiting the bus that Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on, and best of all, they really got into reading this script!
I read the book aloud to the students before they performed the script. Altogether this took about half an hour.
You can access the reader's theater script here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1A_-wv0_v4vHGyo3Hs2Fd3jk-OG9L1im-x-s2qi8_-rQ.