Archives for posts with tag: Classroom storytelling

Tell it again, please

June 24, 2011 //

The two-room school was on the river side of Highway 97, about halfway between Wenatchee and Chelan. Fruit trees in central Washington were covered with the blossomed promise of a good crop.

Orondo was too small to offer much more than housing for farm workers and a handful of other families. Their tiny settlement was strung along the east bank of the Columbia River.

Orondo is in central Washington's fruit-growing region.

A quarter of a century ago there weren’t more than sixty children in the school. Kindergarten through third grade met in one room. Grades four through six had their own teacher in the other room. When I parked outside the school, curious children ran up. They knew the storyteller was coming and greeted me warmly.

I told stories to the younger classes, then to the older group. They were sponges, absorbing the stories through every pore. They were so eager, so responsive I was as entranced by the stories as they were. And then it was over, and I had promises to keep in other schools.

Two years later I toured the same schools in central and eastern Washington. Once again, I turned my vehicle into the small parking lot. Once again, curious children ran up to greet the visitor and escort me into the school.

I started with the younger children and told them a whole new set of stories, ones I knew I hadn’t pulled out of the hat for my first visit. Then I joined the older group. Two-thirds of them had been in the younger group two years earlier. I was eager to tell them stories that would be new to them, more challenging, more suited to their growing maturity.

They would have none of it. “Tell us about the hen and the giant. We want to hear about the giant pumpkin.” And so it went, story after story. After the fourth and fifth graders had heard the stories they remembered, the sixth graders insisted on hearing the ones they had heard in fourth grade. Forty-five minutes stretched to an hour, then ninety minutes, until I finally had to stop because the school day was nearing its end.

The children taught me an important lesson that day. I was still a fairly new storyteller and assumed audiences always wanted to hear new material. I was feverishly adding stories to my repertoire so as to never repeat one to a group I’d performed for before.

Stuff and nonsense. When we hear a song that stirs us, a melody that haunts us, we want to hear it again and again. We learn the words, sing it in the shower, belt it out as we drive, buy the track.

The same is true of stories. When they resonate, we want to travel that path again, and not just when we are children.

Years ago, Professor Spencer Shaw told me children want the same book read to them over and over because “the children know what’s going to happen, but the characters don’t”. The children in the two-room Orondo school knew what was going to happen in those stories. They also knew the characters didn’t. So I sent my mind back into the world of those earlier stories. Together, the children and I found out.

Tags Classroom storytelling, importance of stories, power of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Storytelling in schools, The art of storytelling

Toy naming and the stories of children

May 17, 2011 //

A toy is an empty space, waiting for a child to fill it with stories. Photo from nerissa's ring Flickr photostream

The brown-eyed five-year-old proudly held up her new doll. As always, I asked what her new companion’s name was. You’ll know this was a while back when I tell you her response: “Strawberry Shortcake”.

Children in the K-3 school where I spent my last two years as a school librarian loved to show off their new doll, plastic duck, stuffed animal, or train engine. I always oohed and ahed appropriately, and I always asked what they had named it. I can’t remember a single time when they had given it a name they hadn’t heard in a commercial for it.

I’d never had children, but I figured not re-naming toys gave story-making power to the corporations that created them. My job was to return that power to the children.

“Does she have another name? A special name you gave her?”

“No. She’s Strawberry Shortcake.”

“What does she like to eat? What’s her favourite game? Does she sleep in her shoes? Does she wear her t-shirts inside out?”

Question by question, I’d encourage the children to create a story about their new toy. Give it character, eccentricities, preferences, secrets only the child could know. Some gave up quickly. They couldn’t imagine a life for the toy that existed outside the confines of the marketing story. I was sad for them but hoped all the stories they heard during their library visits would fill them with enough colourful details to stir their imaginations.

Others entered into the game, whether quickly or reluctantly. After they had answered a dozen questions, I’d say to them, “That doesn’t sound like a Strawberry Shortcake (or whatever other name they’d given). Ask her if she has another name she likes better, a name that is hers alone, a name she’d like you to call her.”

For the children, the new names became signals for the toys’ stories. For me, they were a way to combat the weighty power of marketing by encouraging children to believe in the power of their own story-making abilities. They were born with them, but advertising had been having its way with them, robbing them of some of their belief in their own creativity.

My insistence on children’s giving names and stories to their toys was a tiny gesture in the big scheme of things. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, importance of stories, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Storytelling in schools, The importance of storytelling

Storytelling lifeline for a homeless boy

January 26, 2011 //

Missing a chance to shine

“Sol’s” story is true, though I’ve changed his name out of deference for the young hero. I met him while working as Storytelling Director for Stagebridge, the US’s oldest senior theatre company

Marijo Joseph, a talented performer who often worked with Stagebridge, was teaching Sol and some of his classmates to be storytellers. The day of their school performance, Sol nearly missed his chance to shine.

When I stopped by the office to sign in, Sol was there on “house suspension”.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“The teacher said I was talking, but it wasn’t me.” Whatever the case, at that moment Sol was about to miss one of his few chances for positive recognition.

Marijo set off to persuade his classroom teacher to give him a reprieve long enough to perform. I chatted with him briefly, then went to the auditorium.

Sol becomes the story

Minutes before he was to take the stage, Sol hurried into the room. When his turn came, he gave a first-person narrative of a slave who had rowed hundreds of others to freedom. Sol was a natural storyteller. When he performed, he was the story. Though he was the only white child in his class, Sol crawled so completely into the character his skin color didn’t matter.

My eyes were on Sol so I didn’t notice a few classmates lifting their arms to sniff their armpits in a gesture of disdain. The mockery was cruel, but Sol often did reek of unwashed clothing on an unwashed body. His home was a van with no electricity. If he did homework it was by the glow of battery-operated tap lights. Baths and clean clothes were luxuries.

The children’s teasing was not surprising. I’d seen turkeys do the same thing. They’d spot a bit of blood on another turkey and keep pecking at it, sometimes until the victim died. In this case it was Sol’s spirit they were pecking.

Sol was one of those children who talk easily with adults but have trouble finding a niche with their peers. He was one of the few white children in the school, but deep poverty and a lack of age-appropriate social skills were what isolated him from his classmates.

He adored Marijo, who inspired him to stand tall in spite of the stones life was throwing in his path. As we left the gymnasium after the performance, Sol came up to her. “Thank you,” he said. “Stagebridge has provoked my interest in storytelling.”

Wondering how to help

Lady Laura performing at the 2004 Tellabration

Success in storytelling did not improve Sol’s classroom behaviour. When she couldn’t handle him any more, the teacher transferred him across the hall, to a classroom with a male teacher.

At Stagebridge we pondered how we could help the talented but troubled young man. We decided on a modest plan to focus his energy on something besides stirring up trouble.

Aside from Marijo, he also knew one of our skilled elders, Lady Laura. She had been his classroom’s special storyteller. She was the one who had first sparked his interest in storytelling. We decided to enlist her in our scheme.

Lady Laura was a retired black school teacher. She had dealt with every kind of challenge a student could throw in a teacher’s path. She graciously agreed to go into the school and let Sol interview her, then help him write a story about her good enough to record on radio.

With Lady Laura and Sol’s teacher both supportive, I drove to the school and spoke to Sol. I reminded him that we thought he was a very talented storyteller and asked if he would be willing to interview Lady Laura and write a story for radio. He would have to agree not to act out in class between then and the radio taping, and he would have to keep up with his studies in spite of the extra work. Sol was thrilled and promised to adhere to his end of the bargain.

A small success

I’d like to report the next few weeks were smooth sailing. They weren’t. Lady Laura found working with Sol challenging. His listening and writing skills were not well developed. And, to be honest, being in close proximity to a child with no washing facilities was not always pleasant.

But they both persevered, and on the day of the radio taping, Sol was one of nine children whose stories were recorded for future broadcast on KPFA.

As usual, I had loaded my van with children and adults needing a ride to the studio. My last stop on the return trip was Sol’s. A day earlier, when I offered to pick him up at the school and take him home after the taping, he told me I could drop him off at the bus stop. He’d catch the bus home.

So I was honoured when he felt comfortable enough to let me take him all the way to the beat-up van he and his mother called home. It was parked on a freeway overpass in a neighborhood so rundown the police probably didn’t bother with anything as insignificant as a broken-down van piled high with a family’s few worldly goods.

The school year ended shortly after the radio taping. Next fall Sol was no longer in the same school. No one knew where he had gone. I’ve no idea what happened to him and don’t kid myself his life was forever transformed by his brush with storytelling.

I do know that for at least a while he knew others saw him as talented and valued. For at least a few weeks he believed he was strong enough to draw gems from the rough stones of his life. I hope the memory was a source of courage on the rough path ahead.

And sometimes, when I think of him, my heart just hurts.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, importance of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Healing power of stories, Memoir, Storytelling in schools, The importance of storytelling

We’re not dumb kids

December 15, 2010 //

From February 2004 through April 2005 I was Storytelling Director for Stagebridge, America’s oldest senior theatre. My job was to work with seniors who were taking stories into the inner-city schools of Oakland, California. At the time, the position was supported by a federal grant intended to support literacy programs. Though reading improvement is hard to correlate with any one thing, the researchers working with the program were able to measure a statistically significant difference between students in classes with a storyteller and those without. “We’re Not Dumb Kids” is just one of many stories from an extraordinary year.

When Jim McWilliams walked into the class, a room full of fifth graders fell silent. They knew something good was coming.

Jim was “their” storyteller. Once a month the retired lawyer came into the inner-city Oakland school to tell stories to the class. When he spoke of leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, he called them Medgar (Evers) or Martin (Luther King). They had been friends and fellow activists, not just names he read in the newspaper.

The school lay in the heart of a city pocked like a bombing target. Some neighbourhoods were so derelict they looked as if they had been abandoned, and in many ways they had been. Drugs were sold openly. Violence was so common when children talked about gang beatings or drive-by shootings they were generally not referring to television shows.

Most of the houses surrounding the school were in good repair. The streets were home to Black American families with middle-class aspirations, but many of the children in the school were from families barely scraping by or living in poverty. The hills above them were populated be comfortably middle- and upper-class white families. That kind of social disparity has high costs. The average academic ranking of the students in the school was low.

I visited the school to watch Jim in action. He started out with a short folktale, something surefire to warm up his audience. They listened, as they always did when Jim spoke, but they were listless and distracted.

Jim finished his story and looked around. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

The children answered glumly, “They’re closing our school.”

School closures were being announced regularly in the Bay Area, a curious consequence of the federal “No Child Left Behind” program that was mandating standardized tests and minimal performance standards. Schools that didn’t measure up to required standards were losing funding.

“Why are they closing your school?” Jim asked.

“Because we’re dumb kids.”

Jim McWilliams speaking with a young admirer after a performance in Oakland, California

Jim was startled, but he understood after their teacher read part of a news release. It named schools being closed because they were “underperforming”. The kids knew what that meant. They were dumb.

“Are you dumb kids?” Jim asked.

“No,” they chorused.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

It hadn’t occurred to the children they could challenge the school board’s decision. As Jim talked with them and asked them questions, the gloom in the class lifted. Jim organized students to write letters to the school board. He taught them how to protest the closure of the school and their portrayal as underachievers, how to get on the speakers’ list at the next board meeting, how to stand up for themselves, how to contact media and enlist allies. (They learned the lesson well and talked him into coming with them to the board meeting and speaking on their behalf.)

The children’s eyes were shining when we left. They were sitting tall. They were afire with enthusiasm and not because they expected the school board to reverse its decision. Jim had been clear that was unlikely.

Jim had given them something more important than winning a battle to keep the school open. He had given them a new story. They were not “dumb kids”. They were smart, socially active fighters for justice.

I don’t know how long they held onto that new story. I don’t know how many lives were changed that day. I do know a room full of children learned they could refuse to be labeled.

And that is a powerful story.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, importance of stories, Jim McWilliams, No Child Left Behind, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Healing power of stories, Memoir, Storytelling in schools, The importance of storytelling

Video conversations tap storytelling techniques

August 28, 2010 //

Friends of the Earth have created a very powerful short plea for the “men in suits” to act on what they already know to avert disaster due to climate change. Using a child as narrator and some clever visual storytelling, the video is a graphic summary of the problem and the need for urgency.

I found this through a new Twitter friend, Nick Kellet. He’s CMO and Product Strategist for HuStream, a company that “mixes human psychology video wizardry and web-based technology to redefine viewer engagement.” Browsing around their site gave me all kinds of ideas for using storytelling for promoting, informing and inspiring.

One very exciting example is a “video conversation” that features children from a school that raised $16,000 for a project called “Free the Children“. A second example is a promo video for Isagenix’s Beyond Courage personal development retreat.

There are lots more good examples on the Friends of the Earth YouTube Channel and on HuStream. Have to say I’m proud to know the latter is a company right here in my own home town of Kelowna, British Columbia.

Tags business storytelling, Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, Organizational storytelling, storytelling in health care, Storytelling in schools

Categories Business narrative, Health, Organizational storytelling, Storytelling in schools

Bite till the blood runs

April 5, 2010 //

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle. ~Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

For two seasons I traveled the American school route in Germany and England, telling stories to military offspring. The principal approached me before a performance in one of the German schools. It was a tough group, he told me. “Better you than me,” he said, in a voice that intimated he was throwing me to the lions.

They filed in with all the chaos that accompanies a school on the edge of out-of-control. One boy in particular stood out. He slouched into the room with that boneless walk only a teenager can muster. Second row from the back, third seat in, he planted his lanky form. Feet stretched across the narrow aisle, arms crossed, face set, he sat poised to retaliate against the students who would inevitably graze him while trying to clamber over his legs.

He also set the tone for the next 45 minutes. Others would cast side glances his way, to see if it was acceptable to listen or if verbal tomatoes were called for. The first story had to work. Two minutes in, they would accept my offering or eat me for lunch.

Doing a last-minute set shuffle, I chose a short tale guaranteed to settle and center a middle-school audience. I don’t remember what it was now, only that the group was stretched tense as a rubber band aimed in my direction. The story worked. They didn’t fire.

So I told them a fish story to keep them still. (Fish Face from Andy Welsh's photostream on Flickr)

The second story had to keep them hooked, so I chose one that had never failed, “Tayzanne,” from Diane Wolkstein’s extraordinary collection of Haitian tales The Magic Orange Tree. There was nothing noble in the choice. The story is disturbing, haunting, dark enough to calm even a roomful of adolescents. I used it as a club, to dash any troublemakers into silence so I could finish the program and get out of there intact. I’m not proud of the motivation, but it worked.

The lanky boy sat forward and listened, to “Tayzanne” and every story that followed. His compatriots took their cue from him, and the session ended without mishap. I had no illusions that the group was transformed by the stories, but we had all survived without undue injury to their spirits or mine.

A year later I returned to the school. The students showed no recognition of the middle-aged woman who had spun tales for them the year before. Once again, the boy with long legs and attitude slouched in and posted his challenge across the aisle.

When I began the first story, he looked up, his eyes fixed and calculating. He leaned forward and stared. At the end of the story, he shouted, “You the lady that was here last year?”

“Yes,” I replied, expecting the worst.

“Tell that fish story,” he said.

“Yeah,” the others chimed in. “We’ve been talking about it for a year. We still don’t get it. We want to hear it again.”

It was the only story they wanted to hear, the only story they would allow me to tell. When it ended, they peppered me with questions I didn’t even try to answer. Instead, we shared the mystery, the possibilities, the strangeness of the tale and what it revealed about us and about the culture from which it comes.

I left that school with an exhilaration that returns to me as I write. The long-legged boy and his friends reminded me to love the questions. The answers are never clear. They change with each telling of a story, with each hearing of a tale. They change when the events of today mix with the experiences of yesterday.

I have learned to embrace the mystery. I have not found answers, which are as elusive now as when I first understood that the spiritual certainty of my childhood had cracked in the face of a growing appreciation for the questions.

I have learned to be comfortable living in the middle, biting life until the blood runs, knowing Ursula LeGuin was right. “In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.”

This essay first appeared in The Healing Heart: Communities as part of a longer piece, “Seven Lessons”.

Diane Wolkstein’s collection is still a favorite among storytellers:

Tags Classroom storytelling, importance of stories, meaning of stories, power of stories, role of stories, Storytelling in schools

Categories Meaning of stories, Memoir, The importance of storytelling

Twelve Steps to Storytelling with Style

January 21, 2010 //

One of my favourite stories is “Letters from Frank”. I’ve been telling it for so many years the characters are good friends. When I tell the story, I get to have a visit with them. Marvin’s still working at the Post Office at 23rd and Union in Seattle. Sissy still drops by every Monday at ten to see if she’s received a letter from Frank.

Cathryn telling stories at Stagebridge Tellabration in Oakland, California, back in 2004

When I first started telling the story, it was longer. But every time I reached a certain spot in the story, the audience clapped. It took me a while, but I finally had to admit the audience was right. What happened after the applause was a coda, not the story.

I still tag a sentence on, but it’s short and seems to satisfy both the audience and me. The omitted part? Well, maybe one day it will still end up in a story, just not this one.

The tips below have been useful to me. I hope they will be to you, too.

1. Carefully plan your beginning and ending. The middle will flow well once you are off to a good start, and a satisfying conclusion lifts the heart of your listeners. Confidence is contagious. Knowing how you are going to enter a story and just where the exit is will give you that confidence. Once you are well launched in the story, the middle comes easily.

2. Observe yourself when you are telling stories to a friend who listens well. You may be animated, humorous, intense, relaxed, depending on the story and your inclination. The critic who whispers in your ear at other times is still. You are free to speak from the heart. This kind of natural storytelling is a key to your personal style.

3. Tell the story while you are in the first flush of enthusiasm. Polishing can come later, as you discover parts of the story that need work. Find a sympathetic audience, such as a friend or spouse, and try out the story.

4. There are many ways to find just the right images for your story. Read poetry aloud for inspiration. Listen to storytellers and storytelling tapes. Play a favorite instrumental recording, and try telling your story to fit its rhythms and moods. Walk, dance, run, jump—use your body to explore the story.

5. Use simple, evocative language. The listener can’t put you on rewind so has to catch the magic the first time through. Gamble Rogers used to incorporate a mega-syllable vocabulary in his stories, with hilarious results. Most of us will do best sticking with simpler words.

6. Try telling the story from a different point of view. The cat who pulls down the Christmas tree sees the event quite differently from the person who hung the family’s fragile heirloom ornaments on it.

7. Watch other people tell stories. Imitate those things which work best. Experiment with their gestures, character voices, turns of phrases. Keep the things that work for you; discard the rest. It worked for Shakespeare, who borrowed heavily from folklore and paid attention to the varieties of human speech and manner.

8. Each story has its own rhythm. Tell the story in different ways until you have found its internal beat. This is another time when music makes a good partner. Try telling the story to the beat of a tango or a lullaby or a waltz or a march. You’ll have fun doing it and discover nuances in the story you didn’t know were there.

9. Practice with a mirror or a tape recorder unless they make you self-conscious. Try out facial expressions and gestures, dialects and character voices. Become the characters, letting your body and voice reflect the boldness or timidity or sauciness of each. Don’t hold back. No one but you is listening or watching. Then use what the mirror or tape recorder teaches you when you tell the story to an audience.

10. Stories you love reflect essential truths about you. We all choose stories that reflect some image of life as we see it or wish it might be. The stories that resonate deeply in us, whether they be serious or funny, are a joy to tell. When you crawl inside of them, experiencing them as you tell them, not holding back, your telling will be received as the gift it is. The best stories are an authentic reflection of the teller, whether they are original or being passed on.

11. The more often you tell a story, the more you will enjoy it. It’s true that sometimes stories wear out for us, no longer reflecting our view of life. Set those aside. But some stories are so true for us that they are forever fresh. The first few times you tell a story like that, you will probably be concentrating on the sequence of events. The real fun starts when you have told the story so many times you no longer have to worry whether you will remember it. You will find yourself keenly anticipating some particularly delicious passage, anxious to see the audience discover it for the first time.

12. The more stories you learn, the more easily you will learn stories. Exercising your story memory is like exercising a muscle. When you use it regularly, it becomes elastic and takes less effort. Fortunately, story learning does not require a photographic memory. What it does require is a willingness to surrender to the story, following its path rather than stopping to examine each stone along the way. Some stories, such as those of Rudyard Kipling, are dependent on words, the stones the author used to build the story’s path. Most are not. Your own words will keep you on the track, without fear of straying. The first few stories may be a struggle to learn; the next fifty will be easier.

Tags Classroom storytelling, Personal narratives, The art of storytelling

Categories The art of storytelling

10 tips for turning students into storytellers

January 13, 2010 //

Someone said to me the other day that good storytelling can’t be taught. People are storytellers or they aren’t, and no amount of coaching can change that.

The same could be said about the best dancers, musicians, and painters. Some have such innate talent that, when they move to music or pick up an instrument or brush, inspiration seems to flow from them.

On the other hand, I’m reminded of the oft-quoted Henry Van Dyke, “Use what talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no bird sang except the best”.

I would argue that what Barbara Ueland, in If You Want to Write, says about writing is also valid for storytelling: “Yes, when you get down to the True self and speak from that, there is always a metamorphosis in your writing, a transfiguration.”

When someone tells a story from the “True self”, both the teller and the tale are transfigured. Sometimes all a person needs is permission to be her true self or to speak from his deepest wisdom.

When I began teaching storytelling, I tried all these tips with students. I soon found they were just as successful with adults.

Heather and her grandmother were part of an intergenerational storytelling class I taught at the Naramata Centre in British Columbia.

1. Use pantomime as a means of preparing students to tell stories. Push a heavy box across the floor, up a hill. Walk on a log high over a rushing river. Eat a banana. Be a slug, a seagull. Learn to ride a bicycle.

2. Do action-conversation skits. Be three fish and a heron in a polluted inlet. Be a garbage can, being filled, being emptied, standing in the rain. Be a car with a nail in its tire. Be the tip of an artist’s paintbrush. In each case, accompany the action with the character’s verbal reaction to the situation.

3. Convey impressions through gestures. What kinds of gestures, motions, poses, and facial expressions convey confusion, concern, friendliness, gregariousness, boredom, shyness, tension, fear, joy, confidence, uncertainty, surprise, interest?

4. Tell a story solely with gestures. Have a partner mirror them.

5. Use a painting or photograph as the basis for a story-building session.

6. Pose a character and a conflict, and do a story in the round. The leader starts the story; each person adds a few sentences, and on through the conclusion. Have students rewrite their own versions, letting their minds free for wild flights of imagination.

7. Make up excuse stories: Why I didn’t do my homework. Why I can’t clean my room. Why I lost the library book. Why I’d rather eat with my fingers. Why I can’t comb my hair.

8. Tell personal experience stories: I was so embarrassed… I’ve never had a pet like that before… That was my best birthday ever… I was so scared… I really got in trouble for that… I laughed until I cried… I’ll never forget my favorite tree…

9. Tell stories into a tape recorder. Listen to them. Improve on them. Add vivid description, lively dialogue. Record them again. Tell them to other students, to your family, to the class.

10. Tell folk tales. Learn the story as a series of images rather than as memorized words. Read the story over and over. Draw pictures of the important scenes. Use them to tell the story, then just tell the story.

NB: In my opinion, Barbara Ueland’s book on writing is still one of the best. I’m delighted to see it is still in print.

See also:
Storytelling in the Classroom
10 ideas for bringing storytelling into the school day
15 ideas for expanding students’ understanding of a story

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, Storytelling in schools

Categories Storytelling in schools

15 ideas for expanding students’ understanding of a story

January 6, 2010 //

The tips below can also be used as writing prompts and not just in schools. I started using these years ago, when I taught a group of third-grade students to become storytellers.

One child in particular stands out in my mind. Robbie was a shy boy, the kind who can easily be overlooked because he never speaks up, never acts out, always does his homework. I was stunned when he applied to join the school’s first storytelling troupe.

Though she had never met me, Irish storyteller Liz Weir, welcomed me into her home and set up a storytelling tour for me. This was back in 1988. Liz was a librarian at the time and has gone on to a distinguished career as a storyteller and writer. Here I

I was a school librarian at the time and asked his teacher if she thought Robbie could learn to be a storyteller. I can’t remember her exact words, but it was on the order of, “If you can teach a dishrag to dance.” She wasn’t being mean, just honest.

Still, Robbie’s mother was my best volunteer. I’m not proud of myself for having approved Robbie’s request to keep his mother onside.

Within a few weeks, Robbie not only chose and learned his own story. He learned everyone else’s. He became the troupe’s coach. When a storyteller froze on stage and couldn’t remember the story, Robbie quietly fed her lines until she recovered. When another fell ill, Robbie stepped in and told his tale.

And Robbie could spin stories like a master. He didn’t just recite the stories. He became the stories. You could see it on the enthralled faces of his audiences, children and adults alike.

Robbie telling stories as a member of the Longridge Elementary Storytelling Troupe

At the end of the year, his mother told me she had been shocked when Robbie asked her to sign his application. “Why do you want to be a storyteller,” she had asked. “You’re too shy.”

Her quiet son had replied, “I think it’s time I stopped being so shy.”

I’ve no idea if Robbie’s life was changed by his transformation from invisible boy to animated storyteller, but I know mine was. If I’d had the slightest doubt of the transforming power of storytelling, I lost it as I watched Robbie take the stage.

1. Identify the beginning, middle, and end of a story. Draw pictures for each. Retell the story using the pictures.

2. Act out scenes from familiar stories. Crawl right into the characters. How would a troll rise from under a bridge? How would a wolf speak to a child in a red cape? How would a chicken run from a falling sky?

3. Compare as many variants of a folktale as you can find. Choose variants that come from different cultures. In a study of world cultures, folktales reveal both similarities and differences. The Cinderella story is a good example. Similar stories are told around the world: Aschenputtel in Germany, The Magic Orange Tree in Haiti, Vasilisa the Beautiful in Russia. Nancy Keane has put together a list of many of these variants.

4. Write a different ending for a familiar story. Supposing the queen had not guessed Rumpelstiltskin’s name? What if the frog had never turned into a prince? What if the three bears had lived in a city apartment?

5. Retell a story from the viewpoint of one of the characters. How would the witch tell the story of Hansel’s and Gretel’s nibbling on her house? How would the oldest step-sister tell the story of Cinderella?

6. Write imaginary conversations between characters. Have Jack and the Giant talk about the magic beanstalk and all the things Jack stole. Bring together characters from different stories. Molly Whuppie and Jack could compare notes on their adventures with giants. They could write letters to each other.

7. Have students retell a familiar story in pairs. One begins; the other takes over when you call, “Switch.” This is a challenge to listening, sequencing, and memory skills.

8. Change the motivation of a central character. Rewrite the story from that point of view. Make Snow White’s stepmother into a sympathetic character. What if Rumpelstiltskin was trying to save the queen from a king who only wanted to marry her because she could spin gold?

9. Describe characters in a story. What does little Red Riding Hood look like? The Frog Prince? The giant who confronts Jack?

10. Describe the landscape of a story. What does the Three Bears’ house look like? What kind of a forest surrounded the house of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother? What was the weather like when the goats came tripping over the bridge?

11. Read pourquoi (how-and-why) tales that contemplate the origins of natural phenomena. Then have students write their own. What are rainbows? How did skunk get his special weapon? What formed the mountains? Why do koalas sleep most of the day?

12. Experiment with body language. What one gesture could characterize the princess who slept on a pea? How would the Beast stand and move in the presence of Beauty?

13. Have students write in a journal as though they were a story character. What would one of the dwarfs write in his on the day Snow White appears? What would a robber write in his after being frightened by the Brementown musicians? What would Cinderella have to say about her stepsisters?

14. Publish a newspaper with folk tale headlines and articles. “Chicken leg fools witch.” “Blowhard wolf meets his match.” “Hundred-year sleep ends with kiss.” (Imagine how the Personals column would read!)

15. Ask students to write a song or chant for the characters in a story. What does Jack sing as he climbs the beanstalk? What does the princess chant when the frog asks her to take him home?

Storytelling in the Classroom
10 ideas for bringing storytelling into the school day
10 tips for turning students into storytellers

Tags Classroom storytelling, Educational storytelling, Storytelling in schools

Categories Memoir, Storytelling in schools

10 ideas for bringing storytelling into the school day

January 4, 2010 //

My storytelling career began back in Rochester, New York, where I was a school librarian in a suburban community (Greece) north of the city. I didn’t think of it as storytelling when I told high school students stories in order to lure them into reading. Sometimes it backfired when a whole classroom of students would rush to borrow the one copy of the book.

It wasn’t until I asked the school district to move me to an elementary school that I began to put a name to what I was doing. Placed in a school with grades K-3, I found myself with 24 classes a week trooping into the library. Teachers got a 45-minute break, and I got a library full of squirmy children. They did not need the research skills I’d been teaching teens. They did need stories.

One day I decided to try telling them a story, instead of reading it. “Where’s the book?” the kindergarten class wanted to know.

“In your head,” I replied.

As I started the story, I felt an unfamiliar stillness in the room. This class had always enjoyed hearing books read to them. This was different, as if every child in the room was holding his or her breath while the story unfolded in their heads.

A five-year-old with straight brown hair and wide brown eyes leaned closer and closer as the story unfolded. When it ended, her eyes were still glazed, as if she were reluctant to leave the landscape of the tale. Finally, her whole body relaxed and she sighed, “That was a good story.”

During a very special fifteen months, I was Storytelling Director for Stagebridge, the oldest senior theatre troupe in America. This was a scene I saw over and over, delight on the faces of intergenerational audiences, listening to Stagebridge storytellers.

I was hooked. I still read books to all the classes, but I also told stories, letting the words spin through their minds, triggering a kind of intense listening unlike anything else I did with them.

When I left teaching to take to the road as a professional storyteller, I discovered that intense listening occurred with people of all ages. And I realized the teachers who still shine in my memory were all storytellers.

Here are ten suggestions for making storytelling a natural part of classroom culture.

1. Use stories to explore various phenomena: stages of growth, old age, customs and traditions. Stories abound on the Web. A good place to start looking for them is on Jackie Baldwin’s Story Lovers Web site.

2. Enliven the study of history by telling anecdotes about the famous and not so famous.

3. Read or tell stories to begin the study of a new country, a new concept, or a current issue.

4. Reluctant or struggling scholars like to know that Einstein had problems in school or that Galileo got in trouble for telling the truth. Share with them the people behind the scientific discoveries.

5. Tell stories about yourself: childhood memories, struggles and triumphs, humorous anecdotes.

6. Share your excitement whenever you read or hear a story that moves you to laughter or tears or a sense of wonder. Don’t worry that you may not remember all the details. Your enthusiasm will tell them more than the words alone.

7. Encourage students to share their own stories: the puppy’s mischief, the monster in the closet, the first lost tooth, the first week in a new school. Having a chance to be center stage, to have everyone listening is a powerful experience. So is learning to be sensitive to an audience, to shape a story so that it captures the listeners.

8. Examine television and newspaper for stories. Talk about them with your students. Look at story structure, the natural rhythms of the story, character motivations and types, differences in styles.

9. Watch for story references in advertising. What familiar characters do you find? Share them with your students. Have them find others.

10. Tell a story for no reason, which is often the best reason. Revel in the pleasure of watching students listen to you more closely than they do at any other time. Know that your stories, told with enthusiasm and conviction, are one of the greatest gifts you can give your students. Don’t give a thought to technique while you are telling. Enter the story wholly. Your pleasure will be contagious.

Storytelling in the Classroom
15 ideas for expanding students’ understanding of a story
10 tips for turning students into storytellers