William Tell - Small Group Reader's Theater

This is a small group reader's theater is for 4 students. It is based on the tale of William Tell. In the script - The tyrant Gessler has placed his hat on top of a pole and told all of the Swiss people in town that they must bow down to it when they see it. William Tell lives in the mountains with his family and does not believe in following the tyrant so he refuses to bow down to the pole when he comes to town. Lord Gessler sees him and has him arrested. William Tell still refuses to bow down and tells them to take him to jail. Gessler comes up with a cruel plan. He tells William he will kill both William Tell AND his son unless William is able to shoot an apple off of his son’s head with an arrow. William has no choice but to try. He takes an arrow and then another one … just in case. Then, William Tell makes the shot and they both go free. Later he admits the second arrow was to kill Gessler if he had missed and hurt his son.

There is a writing assignment for the students to do at the bottom of the last page. Students are asked to find the moral of the story. I use reader's theaters to encourage my students to practice fluency. It is a fun way to do something that they need. Most of my scripts are in black and white so they photo copy easily and do not waste ink. The problem with many other reader's theaters is that students spend a lot of time waiting for their part. When you have a small group they get more practice and you get less off task behaviors.

My name is Melanie Whitesides but my store name is Wonbyone and I hope that your students enjoy this script as much as mine did. If you like this script look for other tall tales. Let me know how things go!

William Tell - A Swiss Folk-hero by Melanie Whitesides is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.