My current series of postings is about how to get children actively participating in stories. As the basis of today’s tip, I’m focussing on a well-known nursery rhyme. It’s come back to mind because of what’s been going on recently in the outside world. The pot-holes in my road have been overflowing with it. People at London bus-stops have been moaning about it. Friends have asked glumly if it’s ever going to stop. And of course the ‘it’ has been the rain. Here’s the nursery rhyme:

     Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
     In a shower of rain
     He fell in a puddle
     Right up to his middle
     And he never went there again.

Because of the incessant rain – and today’s clear skies in London serve as a reminder of how bad it’s been – this rhyme could be a good one to include in Story-time soon. It may even be an advantage if the rhyme is already familiar to the children. Handled in a different way from usual, it can help you build up your techniques for getting participation from them. (more…)

WIPs is the name we give to a group to which I belong. There’s no flagellation involved. WIPs stands for Works in Progress. Today, 30th November, we are having a long Saturday session in which all kinds of different things will be presented – songs, readings, piano pieces, a cello piece, some pots which one of our members has made, a sculpture another is creating and a piano duet that has been newly composed by the same group-member who is playing the cello.

For my part, I’ll be reading Shopping List, the story I mentioned last week. At the end of it (which will be just before tea), I’ll be asking the group if they can work out from the story what the shopping list had on it. For me, the experience will be a test of how well my story held their attention. For it’s a very true thing – it’s almost a storyteller’s rule – that you certainly won’t remember what you didn’t listen to in the first place.

Last week I said I’d include Shopping List in this week’s blog. But since the whole thing is four pages long in total, I’ll confine my offering to the first section. I do hope you enjoy it. I should add that it’s part fiction, part childhood memory, part current life. Items from the shopping list are in RED. 

The Shopping List Story:

It was early, but not THAT early, and already it felt like there was too much to do. (more…)

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…)

This evening I’m off to the BASE Awards event in Wolverton. And if you don’t know where Wolverton is, it’s right next to Milton Keynes.

Ancient Egypt and Us

Milton Keynes is a resonant place-name for me. I once worked with a brilliant class of 10-year olds there. One of the topics in their class at the time was Ancient Egyptians. The other was Ourselves. Their teacher wanted a project to bring the two topics together.

Of course, it’s possible to tell stories from Ancient Egypt. I did – and the children loved them. But how is it possible to imagine the length of time that has passed since the Ancient Egyptians existed? These children certainly couldn’t. Like most children of their age, they had little sense at all of time passing. So I came up with the idea of a Memory Chart on which each child would use hieroglyphs of their own design to notate one memory for each year of their lives so far. We made an exception for their first four years: most people have few recollections from that period. So those years, we decided, could be lumped together and occupy just one box in each person’s chart.

Memory work

The children were brilliant. When we did the initial memory work, there was a lot of jotting down, telling and retelling of what had happened. Then came the making of the memory charts. Each person creating their own, the hieroglyphs designed by the children were fun and inventive. Last came the bit of the project when, working in small-ish groups, the children worked out clever creative ways to tell their small stories as a group. One group, I recall, created a fascinating audio-spiral of their stories where each different year in their memories was signalled by the sound of a gong.

Milton Keynes again

So Milton Keynes it will be tonight. The BASE awards organisers have worked very hard. I hope their Awards event proves a lovely, sociable success. What’s more, I hope it helps to promote and encourage all aspects of the art of storytelling. (more…)

Monsters make an excellent theme for developing children’s creativity. Monsters appeal to young people – there’s something essentially subversive in both.

So whether you’re a parent, teacher or children’s club leader – and whatever the age of the children you work with – you can get a lot out of monsters.

Here’s a programme for pursuing a Monsters theme:

• Find one or two good monster stories – for instance the Greek story of Typhon with older children 

• Prepare the stories for telling, then tell them to your children, be they in class, at home or in some kind of children’s club

• Allow time for the children to come up with comments and questions (in class or clubs, working in pairs or groups is best)

• Ask the children to suggest some modern-day monsters – you might be impressed by their ideas – and make a list of the monsters

• Invite them to draw, paint or make models of the monsters they’ve thought of (this gives them useful thinking time)

• Give them the time to make up a story about their particular monster (working in groups is best in a class)

• Get them to tell their story (each group can tell in turn to the others)

Fantastic!

This whole enterprise could take a full morning or evening session or be spread out over several sessions. (more…)

A Memory Walk is a fantastic thing to do with children. This week I was reminded of its potential while thinking about Dylan Thomas whose work is to be celebrated this coming Saturday, October 5th, in the evening entertainments at the London Welsh Literature Festival that follow my performance of my storytelling piece, Travels With My Welsh Aunt.

Dylan Thomas lived in Carmarthenshire in the village of Laugharne. Back in 2001, I was asked to join with Welsh artist Catrin Webster to run The Boathouse Project. This was to be a week-long project to explore Dylan Thomas, his work and the place where he lived, with Top Juniors and Year 7s from Carmarthenshire schools. Catrin would work with them through the medium of art. I would work with them through storytelling.

The Memory Walk I used with the groups of children attendeding was one of the best techniques I’ve ever invented to prime children’s language and their storytelling. With each new group at the beginning of each day session, I began by talking a bit about storytelling, telling a couple of stories and introducing some of Dylan Thomas’ characters and story ideas. A lot of people liked the thought of Captain Cat in Under Milk Wood, also the grandfather in A Visit to Grandpa’s who imagines every night that he’s driving a cart and horses when actually he’s sitting in bed. The idea of a boathouse proved inspiring too and so did the Voices of the Drowned that also figure in Under Milk Wood. Whose voices could they be today? And when might we hear them? (more…)

A surprise contribution to this blog arrived this week from Jean Edmiston, my friend and long-term colleague as a storyteller. Jean lives and works in her native Scotland these days so I don’t get to see much of her.

But we often speak on the phone about stories, storytelling and our common approach, which is to believe in how stories can empower imagination for everyone if they are approached in a sharing way. Below is what Jean wrote.

The bag of pebbles (more…)

You often come across them on beaches: little worlds that have been lovingly made and left to their subsequent fate by their creators. These little worlds may be excavated pools surrounded by sand-castles and carefully decorated with shells, pebbles and feathers.

Or they may be Stonehenge-type arrangements of rocks. Or maybe, amazingly, lifelike figures created from an arrangement of stones.

I remember making such things as a child.

Fairy pools

So it was a great delight this week to come across a little world in the very process of being created down at Pwll Strodyr, our favourite tiny Pembrokeshire cove. Hardly anyone goes to Pwll Strodyr, which is one of the reasons we love it.

This week, on a beautifully warm early evening, a man and a woman and their young daughter were there. ‘We’re making fairy pools,’ said the man when we greeted him as we arrived. ‘That’s nice,’ I replied. ‘It means you could get some fairies visiting and they’ll probably bring some luck.’

When I went swimming a little while later, I was careful to collect some long strands of green seaweed which I offered to the little girl as mermaid’s hair. (more…)

August days are times to relax, take your shoes off, go for a swim. They’re also times off for your mind, opportunities to notice things in a different kind of way, mull them over and allow the seeds of a story to sprout in your mind.

Years ago, Paul and I went on holiday to the isles of Mull and Iona. We were intrigued, on Mull, by the number of mail-boxes we passed. Again and again there they were on the road-side at the turn-off to farms and houses. Contraptions where the postman could leave people’s post, they came in different colours, shapes and sizes. Many looked like little houses. We couldn’t help noticing and commenting on them. In a flash, Mr Beaton existed.

The mail-box story (more…)

It’s the summer holidays – just the right time for some storytelling games. On your own, you can deliberately set out to develop all kinds of alternative scenarios to situations in traditional stories or that are happening in your own lifstorytelling games are fun in pairs or in groups.

Storytelling games develop imagination, relish quirky ideas, treasure inventiveness of language. They’re most fun in pairs or in groups.

This week I came across an excellently ridiculous story that came out of a session I ran way back in 2001. The session was with one of my friend Debbie Guneratne’s Small Tales Storytelling Clubs. I found my note of what happened while sorting through my shelves of old diaries, storytelling journals and books of stories I’ve written. The aim of my sorting was to be throwing stuff away. I can’t say I did much chucking. But I loved the reading and reflecting, particularly in regard to my journals.

The date was Saturday, 17th March 2001. First we played my Empty World game in which, as the game goes on (there’s lots of rhythm and repetition), each participant chooses an item whose name begins with the same first letter as their own first name. Afterwards, I had the idea of suggesting that we try to make links between the items that had been put into our Empty World. On this occasion, these were as follows: (more…)