Hello there,
I can suggest that you take a look at my plays and skits page. You'll see young kids in action in the photos there and you can tell how much they are loving it. There is a group of children in the pictures but all the skits and plays that I wrote may be used with any number of children from one to one up to fifteen max.
You prepare the boys first by teaching the main vocab in the skit using games. Introduce it with listening games, practise with speaking games. Next you practise the vocab in a question or sentence taken from the text in the role-play, again using games.
To get concrete examples of how to do that then by all means sign up to receive the free games that I give out from my site which have a lot of detail on how to take a particular game idea and adapt it to teach different kinds of language.
Once the boys know the key vocabulary from memory and have more or less grasped the key sentence/s you can start to put the play together. So at no time do you give out a script and have them reading off their parts - that just leads to mumbling and it suddenly makes it boring for the children. Whereas doing it from memory forces them to engage.
Hopefully those boys still like songs - because often older boys go off them thinking that they are sissy. So if they do like songs then I recommend using a lot of those and make up actions to them or ask the boys what actions they can think of.
Here is where you can get one of my skits free and read a bit more about using them:
lesson plan and free skit for teaching the present perfect, but you can use the simple past instead if you prefer.
And this is my book of
ESL Role-Plays and Skits for Children.
Kind regards
Shelley