We Are Live! Radio Theater #101

Have you tried everything you can think of and your students are still not engaged? I have a solution.

Turn your classroom into a live radio show—where every student finds their voice and imagination takes center stage.

Turn your classroom into a live radio show—where every student finds their voice and imagination takes center stage.

What if you could learn this unique teaching method in just a few hours—and use it tomorrow?

Welcome to radio theater: a high-energy, low-prep way to spark imagination, build confidence, and get every student involved.

We’re Live! Radio Theater #101 is your ready-to-use guide for bringing the magic of audio drama into grades 4–12. Written by veteran teacher and award-winning director Deborah Baldwin (40+ years, 300+ productions), this classroom-tested resource makes radio theater easy—even if you’ve never tried it before.

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Inside you’ll find:

  • Step-by-step teaching guidance with 20 warm-up exercises to get students comfortable and engaged
  • Tips for voice work, sound effects, and performance prep, plus links to video demonstrations
  • 3 sample AI-created radio scripts—designed as examples for core subject teachers (ELA, history, etc.) to adapt for their own classes
  • A complete three-week unit play written for classroom performance
  • Reflection pages in every chapter to help teachers personalize lessons for their students

Why teachers love it:

  • Engages shy or reluctant students
  • Builds reading fluency, collaboration, and confidence
  • Works in any space—no stage required

So turn down the lights, cue the sound effects, and let the magic begin.
Your classroom is about to go live!

Deborah Baldwin, an acclaimed teacher and director with over four decades of experience, shares her journey. To engage shy, reluctant, or disinterested students in her pre-elective drama class, she recalled vintage radio shows and introduced radio theater plays as a creative solution. Voila! She experienced immediate success. Now, you can experience this phenomenon firsthand with We’re Live! Radio Theater #101.

What people are saying

This author is Credible

★★★★★

As a fellow Speech and Theater educator, I trust classroom materials from a credible source that has had boots on the ground and tread marks on the road. This author is that and more. I can also vouch for this author, for I have worked with her on the stage, behind the stage, and she was a mentor to my high school students who were considering Theater Education as a career. She is an excellent advocate for the Theater and Theater Education. Her passion IS Theater Education.

Engaging Entertaining Enlightening

I enjoyed learning about the history of radio theater. The author shares her own personal love affair with theater and then gives practical tips of preparing students for productions. I loved the tongue twisters, games, and tips on sound effect creation. It’s like the author predicted my questions and prepared answers. The scripts and QR codes are valuable, and I appreciated the modern recommendation of using AI to develop scripts, too. Wow! What a detailed resource… I feel I’m radio-ready! Let the Action begin!

If you are teaching radio, this is the book!

I have been teaching theatre in middle school for the past two years (this is year 20 of teaching for me, but I was teaching language arts), so moving to middle school has been a challenge. I had directed “It’s a Wonderful Life” as a radio show, complete with two foleys doing the sound effects for a local community theatre, which was a great learning experience.

I had read a post by this author that radio theatre is great for our 6th graders because we only get them for 9 weeks. Additionally, 6th graders are notorious for not wanting anyone looking at them. Radio theatre to the rescue! This book has it all, how to do and build the sound effects, script ideas, theatre games, how to use the mics – I feel like everything I was trying to teach myself is contained right here. If you haven’t taught radio and are interested in trying it, get this book. It is fun and the students really enjoy the challenge. Definitely worth the money!

A great tool to engage your students in all subjects areas!

★★★★★

What a great tool that Deb Baldwin has presented in her book, We’re Live! Radio Theater #101 for that classroom teacher who needs a boost in engaging her class. Ms. Baldwin suggests radio theater as a strategy to liven up instruction and help kids get involved in their learning. Kids then become actively engaged with the curriculum, learn to work together with others cooperatively, and boost their self-confidence. In this book, there are detailed suggestions of warm-up activities that can be adapted in any classroom and specified for the targeted age group that is being taught. I was excited to see one called the Rain Storm, that I have personally used in my fifth-grade class and have even seen used schoolwide during an assembly. This book is chalk full of great ideas, aligned with the Common Core Standards, such as voice exercises as warm-ups that could also be used for kids before giving a speech, even if not connected with radio theater. An included bonus is a complete 3-week sample unit. I think given the great examples in this book; I can well see its usefulness of incorporating radio theater to blend Language Arts with both science and social studies topics. What a cool way for the kids to present information they’ve learned in a culminating experience. Given the popularity of today’s podcasts, I can see kids gravitating to this quite easily. I also thoroughly enjoyed hearing about the history of radio theater and the list of sound effects. It was quite enlightening. What a gift for classroom teachers.