A few weeks back now, after an evening with a group of friends, one of them sent me a very nice email. It said he’d really loved a story I’d told and that he’d love listening to me even if I was just reading a shopping list. I was properly flattered and suddenly reminded of a couple of ideas I’d come across once when looking into memorisation techniques.

The ancient Greek technique

One idea from ancient Greece is an exercise for remembering a group of items. You start by mentally associating each item with an object in a room that you know. You have to really focus, making each association as intense or funny or fantastic as you can. After you’ve done that, you should be able to remember your group of items whenever you want to. Just take a mental walk round that room. As you catch sight of the objects in it, the associations you made should flood into your mind – and with them the items you wanted to recall.

The Shopping List Story

The shopping list technique is similar except that it involves creating a story. Perhaps you’re about to go shopping and you haven’t got any paper to make a list. Or maybe you’ve just got vast holes in your brain like I sometimes have these days. (It’s age!) Don’t panic. Mentally assemble the items you want to remember to buy and then start devising a story that connects them up. It can be any kind of story – as ludicrous, fantastical or realistic as you like. The activity could be a fantastic exercise for a class of children (aged about 7 or upwards?) Or equally satisfying with a gaggle of grand-children (Liz – could this be one for you?) Or maybe it’s just what is needed if you’re on your own (in bed with a cough).

Give it a whirl!

This week I’ve had plenty of time. The cough I’ve had for nearly three weeks suddenly became absolutely pernicious and I’ve have had to spend more than one day in bed. Boring. So I got out the two shopping lists my friend had sent me after I’d emailed him back. I hadn’t told him why I was asking him for a shopping list. I’d just said it was for a project I had in mind. Kindly, he sent me two. One was a list of ingredients for a Christmas cake. The other was an ordinary sort of list consisting of 17 different items.

Sitting in bed, I set about my story which I intend as a kind of present for him. I didn’t do much with the Christmas cake list – too long and complicated. But I didn’t entirely ignore it either. Come back next week and I’ll tell you what resulted – or part of it at least. Meantime why don’t you also give it a go? The full 17-strong list is below. If you’re doing it with a class of children, you could always suggest they select just three or four items for their storymaking.

The Shopping List:

Milk….Eggs, medium….Butter, unsalted….Orange juice….Cucumbers….Carrots….Green beans….Lemons….Limes….Diced stewing steak….Cream cheese….Andrex toilet roll….Persil non-bio washing powder….Dettol antibacterial surface cleaner….Stainless steel polish….Vitamin C/Zinc tablets….Tea tree and Mint shower gel

PS: Good luck!

Photos this week are pretty obvious. Cows to represent milk (and, yes, I’ve chosen these particular cows because they were the  most fetching I’ve ever photographed and in the most fetching place in New Zealand). And wooden eggs to represent real eggs (and isn’t it lucky they’re wooden since our cat takes the greatest pleasure in pawing them off their little dish whenever he jumps onto my desk). (more…)

You know a story is working its magic when a listener says they were really inside it. That’s what child after child reported this Wednesday in one of the classes where I was telling stories at St Stephen’s Primary School in Shepherds Bush. I’d asked them what they’d felt during a story I’d told them. ‘As if I was in it.’ ‘Like I was there.’ ‘I felt like it was happening to me.’

The same kinds of thing were said on Thursday at Session 3 of the Parents’ Storytelling Course at Kensington Palace. The parents on the course are a terrific group of people, all of them mums except for one dad. One said this week, ‘This storytelling course is really changing my life.’ It was the greater depth of their response to the world around them that several had noticed – like they were going more deeply into the things around them. One had done lots of Internet research on historical personages linked with the palace. Another is now bringing some of our storytelling techniques into the nightly storytelling she does with her children.

‘It makes them really involved,’ she said. ‘My son is aged nine. Now he is paying more attention.’

Making things happen (more…)

Back in London, I’ve been walking round my local park thinking about one of my favourite stories. It’s a West African story about the Sun and the Moon and how they got into the sky. Whether with adults or children, I find it a great story for telling. It’s also a highly  productive story on which to base a workshop. It gives plenty of opportunities for image-rounds,visualisation, storymapping, hot-seating and other types of workshop activity which can all be seen as contributing to memory work. The story essentially deals with change, a theme which affects us all deeply. It stood me in excellent stead at a conference, now years ago, to celebrate and lament the end of the ILEA, the Inner London Education Authority, when Mrs Thatcher closed it down.

Here’s the story retold very briefly:

How Sun and Moon Got Into the Sky

When Sun and Moon still lived down on this earth, Sun used to go often to visit his friend. His friend was Water and one day Sun asked him why he was always the one to be making the visits. Why didn’t Water ever come and see him? Water said the reason was that he’d never been invited. Sun was apologetic. But when he asked Water to come and visit, maybe even that very day, Water expressed a worry that Sun’s house might not be big enough for him. When Sun assured him that all would be fine, Water suggested that Sun should go and make his house bigger. It wasn’t just him, Water explained to Sun; there was an awful lot in him besides. (more…)