This is an excellent time of the year to take a fresh look at oral storytelling and what it has to offer. About now, Year 7s in Secondary School are usually getting going on some kind of getting-to-know-you project. Who are you? Who am I? It’s part of familiarisation, becoming acquainted and establishing new bonds in a new form and a new school. At the other end of the spectrum, very small children are taking their first steps into education. Attending Nursery School for the first time, they are hearing strange voices, learning new routines, getting used to being with lots of other children.

At this point, I urge teachers and childcare workers across the age-range to consider how told stories engage our attention whatever our age and circumstances. Told stories are when you sit up and take notice. Someone is speaking directly to you – and it’s not to give instructions or obviously to teach you new things. It’s to tell you something that might interest you as another human being.

Sources of information

Plenty of information about oral storytelling is available here on the Internet, on storytellers’ websites and on Youtube, as well as in books, on storytelling courses and in storytelling clubs and even in back numbers of this Blog. Picking up on the art and the craft of storytelling can open new doors for the teller and the hearers. (more…)

With the new school year in England and Wales on the verge of beginning, it was heartening to read Philip Pullman talking about fairytales in a Guardian newspaper interview last weekend.

Grimm Tales for Young and Old comes out in paperback from Penguin Classics on 5 September. It’s Pullman’s retelling of 50 of the Brothers Grimm stories. The Guardian interview was occasioned by the forthcoming publication and the best thing about it for me was that Pullman not only encourages the reading of such stories with children – indeed, he thinks it is vital. He is a terrific advocate of telling them too.

Oral storytelling needs this kind of advocacy. The telling of stories is not a new piece of technology that would inevitably get huge publicity and become desired as the next have-to-get thing. It’s been there over all the centuries of human development. But, sad to say, its enormous and magical power is currently receiving insufficient recognition in the educational world. For anyone who employs it with children – as Pullman himself used to do when he was a Middle School teacher in Oxford – its positive effects quickly become apparent.

Children have an enormous sense of fair play and, according to Pullman, this is the central reason for the appeal of the fairytale to them. Fairytales see that justice gets done. Besides, fairytales have a direct no-nonsense approach to story: there’s never any hanging about, action and event are all-important. This, too, makes them appealing to children. But that’s not the end of the potential of the fairytale for them.

When Philip Pullman was training teachers at Westminster College, Oxford ( where in years gone by I used to give storytelling workshops) he would encourage students to ‘get a few stories into their heads well enough to tell them to a class without referring to the book.’ His Guardian interview attests to the effect on children of doing this: they attend to stories that are told and, years hence, will remember being told them. (more…)

Pattern is everywhere.

We see it in people’s behaviour where, over time, it can be a sign of problems and sometimes, sadly, we discern it too late.

We see it in natural life where often it’s a thing of great beauty as in the seed-pod of a poppy which provides my photo today.

We see it in the weather – and what strange weather we’ve been having this year. We must surely see it as an indication of the great upsets in the world’s climate which are being caused by global warming.

We see it in the life of birds, for instance in the cuckoo’s annual migrations which I regularly learn about in the Cuckoo Blog which the British Trust for Ornithology sends out to cuckoo-sponsors. (more…)

Problem: storytelling in schools is in decline.

Question: what can be done about it?

This week I’ve been given some good ideas. Here’s one.

Response Archive:

The Response Archive idea was sent to me by Hilary Minns of Warwick University. It involves noticing, then noting down, key moments in children’s responses to oral stories they’re being told. The children can be of any age. The responses could happen either during the telling or after in the course of some talk or activity following the telling.

Recording the responses would be a way of beginning an archive of evidence about the value and benefits of storytelling in education. This is greatly needed in my view and Hilary and others agree.

Example: The Gingerbread Man

Here is the example Hilary sent me of the kind of responses that might be captured for the Response Archive. One  student on her storytelling module at the University recently told her class the story of The Gingerbread Man. Afterwards the student role-played being the Gingerbread Man. The children came up with questions. These are the questions they asked:

Why did you run out of the house?
How did you escape from the oven?
How come you were real when you were made out of playdough?
How did you get on the fox’s tail?
Why did you trust the fox?
Did your leg hurt when the fox bit it off?
What was on the other side of the river?

Good, hey? The questions demonstrate how keenly the children had listened to the story and how intelligently they were thinking about its implications. For anyone of the view that these days, it’s difficult to get children to listen, think and speak, let alone be creative, the example could be key.

Action: (more…)

The essential point of any storytelling workshop or course is to inspire and impart – not to disempower. Participants can be enthused in different ways and with diverse outcomes. They may become tellers of stories in their family lives. They may start telling, making and hearing stories with people they work with. They may even conceive the ambition to develop themselves as professional or semi-professional storytellers.

Palpable excitement

On Wednesday and Thursday this week, I felt particularly conscious of this multi-faceted effect. On Wednesday, I was at Warwick University doing one of my annual sessions with students on Hilary Minns’ storytelling module for people working with children. Thursday was the final session of my Kensington Palace course for parents. Both times, I felt the palpable excitement of people who have already started to experience the effects of their storytelling on children. And not only children. One Kensington Palace mother read us a story she’d written during the week. Beautifully written it was too. During the course, she told us, she felt she’d discovered a new facility for writing. She reported how affected her husband had been by this.

New skills, new confidence, new powers of invention: the KensingtonPalace crowd will, I feel sure, go on to great things. Already they are well into planning storytelling clubs for the children in the schools their children attend. I have offered my help in getting these going.

As for the Warwick University students, they’ll soon be planning and writing their end-of-course dissertations. In doing this, they will be using and recording their own new awareness of the effects of stories on children.

Leading workshops – a particular skill

But it’s an important point to make: leading workshops in such a way as to produce these effects is a particular skill of its own. I know I’m good at it (I should be by now!) and of course I know it’s not the only way of working as a storyteller. (I love the other ways, too.) But it does require a particular set of qualities – knowing how to put participants at their ease; activities that can involve all in the group, including the shyest; a storytelling style that does not show itself off but encourages people to feel they can do it too; a way of working that recognises and develops people’s individual interests, skills and styles. And last but not least, a love of employing and sharing the ‘secrets’ of the storytelling art.

The need today

It’s a tall order. And it represents one of my current concerns about what’s happening with storytelling in education today. Right now, we badly need more storytellers who want to foster this way of working so there can be more parents, more teachers and more childcare workers spreading the joys and wisdoms of storytelling. Is enough happening to fund this kind of development? Are enough people aware of the need? What happens if and when this kind of workshop-running dies out? (more…)

Storytelling Cookbook was the title I gave the first little book I put together with stories for children and hints on telling them. No doubt the name came to mind because I can’t help thinking of cooking and eating in connection with storytelling. Listening to stories or people talking about them just feels like participating in a feast. A traditional Scandinavian tale-ender gives the idea another twist:

 ‘And all I know is, that if they are not yet done feasting, then they are probably at it still.’

In other words, when a story ends well, it’s not hard to imagine the characters in it sitting long into the night , chewing things over in more ways than one. When I’m finishing a story with children, I often bring in that idea of eating afterwards – it’s a little bit of a tease.

A tale from India

For instance, in that marvellous Indian tale, Bhambhutia,  (you can find it in The Singing Sack by Helen East), an old lady is threatened with being devoured on her way through the forest to visit her daughter.

The story describes how she succeeds in getting back home inside a life-size clay pot she constructs. But the old lady is clever enough to stay in the pot till the animals who still want to eat her have gone to sleep and are snoring around her. It’s when she hears their snores that the old lady knows it’s safe to climb out and quickly run into her house. But that’s not quite the end of the story. Next morning, she gives the pot its reward for bringing her safely home. Either it can go round the world or it can stay with her.

It’s a good point for a bit of discussion. In my experience, lots of children say they’d choose to go round the world – and in multi-ethnic Britain, many say they’d visit the countries where their families originated. Equally, lots of children decide that, if they were the pot, they’d stay at home with the old lady. We talk about it. Then I end the discussion like this: ‘Well, in the story, it says the pot decided to stay with the old lady. And I know that’s what it did because the last time I went to have tea with her, it was still there.’

The proof of the pudding – Kensington Palace revisited

The proof of the storytelling pudding lies in the eating. Thursday was the 6th session of my Kensington Palace storytelling course for parents. It was intended as an opportunity to reflect on what has happened up till now and what might happen after this. The parents’ reports provided a feast. (more…)

At the end of this week, an old Afrikaans saying came back to my mind. The exact wording eludes me but it goes something like this: We may think we know where we are but all the time we are being carried like great clouds across the sky.

The saying was a favourite of my wise friend, Lynne, poet and publisher and mother of two of my god-children, who died very much too young. Why I remembered it now was the work I’ve had to do on behalf of my Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award nomination. The nomination is being made by the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling. To help, I’ve needed to provide lists of my work over the 30 years of my storytelling. Performances, workshops, courses, special projects, residencies, work in schools, talks, articles, publications – making the lists has been momentous for me, a real walk down memory lane. Yet how else is it possible to demonstrate the work across time of an oral storyteller, especially when, for most of that time, we didn’t have video recordings?

How to measure storytelling

In a very significant sense, the work of the oral storyteller mostly goes into the air (and, hopefully, the hearts and minds of those who listen). How can its results be measured? Its comparative invisibility creates many problems, especially in regard to what happens in education. Especially after the lovely long comment that arrived this week from Hilary Minns of Warwick University, I’ve been thinking about the problems all over again. (more…)

Storytelling has its public side and with World Book Day 2013 coming up on March 7th, it’s interesting to note how – it always happens in my experience – the number of storytelling invitations from schools goes up. I wish schools were as keen to have storytelling regularly all the year round. Yet it’s great to see the association between books and storytelling being made.

The private side

But storytelling has its private side too. I mentioned family bonds last week. On Thursday this week, I got a fresh experience of how magically these can start to arise.

Thursday was Valentine’s Day. At about 3 p.m. I went round to the home of the former wife of one of my former long-term foster-sons. If that seems a bit complicated, it doesn’t matter. She and her family are still very much part of my world and I’d promised her 6-year-old granddaughter I’d be round to read her a story. The little girl loves books and stories and is an attentive listener. She loves talking about the stories and joining in. It’s great.

This time, as well as some books the little girl probably hadn’t seen before – including Sunshine by Jan Ormerod who sadly recently passed away – I took the wherewithal for making some Valentine hearts like the one I wrote about last week.

What happened? Not at all what I’d expected. Two more grandchildren also arrived to visit, neither of whom I’d seen for some time. One is a little girl aged just three. The other is her brother aged five who, last time I saw him, was a bit of a handful. Yet even then I’d noticed how engaged he’d become when I told them Mrs Wiggle and Mrs Waggle. Now I was in for a bigger surprise. (more…)

Where to begin? First, because St Valentine’s Day happens next week, I’m offering some background information on the name of the day together with the suggestion that you bend your mind to looking up a love story to tell. Plus – as you can see from my photos – I’ve got a suggestion of something to make which could form a really great prop for your story, not least because it could also lead to some enjoyable craft work on the part of your audience.

Equally importantly, I have a couple of thoughts related to two great comments on last week’s blog that arrived during the course of this week. Both are from people I know and admire. Both show the kind of passion for storytelling and its effects that, in my view, has a much wider bearing on how we all approach our lives.

St Valentine’s Day

First,  St Valentine’s Day. I’ve been looking up some background. Did you know – I didn’t! – that St Valentine was a priest of Rome who was martyred for succouring persecuted Christians? Why his saint’s day, 14 February, has become a symbol of romantic love is perhaps connected with the love he showed his fellow human beings.

But because of the link between the days, it appears that St Valentine’s Day also reaches much further back into the story of ancient Rome. There, the festival of the Lupercalia used to occur around 15 February. It involved the wild rampaging of youths on the streets and also the giving of presents.

 Zestful energy? Hormones surging? The mating of human beings? It all seems to be part of St. Valentine’s Day. Hence also another old association – with the mating of birds.

A Valentine Heart

Now here’s that prop that you can make. (I actually don’t love the term ‘prop’.)

As in the photo to the left, cut out two paper shapes that look like small, tall loaves of bread. The ones in my photo are 80 mm wide and, excluding the top rounded bit, 80 mm long. Your shapes could be bigger or smaller according to your preference.

Next, as on the right, cut up towards the rounded part of each paper to make six separated legs. With a larger shape, you could choose to have more strips or, with a smaller shape, fewer. Experiment is all. Next: (more…)

The other day I heard that David the cuckoo is on his way home. David is one of several cuckoos the British Trust for Ornithology are tracking in the cause of helping with dangerously declining cuckoo numbers. David has been wintering in the middle of Africa. He’s started his long flight back from the Congo about a week earlier than the first of last year’s cuckoos. To the BTO, it’s the first sign of Spring. 

Signs of Spring?

I await any signs of Spring in Storytelling in Education. Like numerous other storytellers I’ve spoken to, I fear the country is stuck in a very long drear Winter as far as storytelling in schools is concerned. Storyteller visits to schools have suffered. So has storytelling training for teachers. OK, there are still the big events. National Storytelling Week has just been taking place and lots of exciting events have happened inside and outside of schools. Next there’ll be World Book Day which this year is on March 7th. On that day I’ll be working in Kensington Palace with a group of parents who want to learn to tell stories to children.

But as previous readers of this blog will know, my concern is that storytelling be not only for special occasions but embedded in children’s lives. In Primary schools and Nursery schools, it is of particular importance because it gives children such improved confidence with language and also the knowledge that they all have an imagination, which is such an essential skill for life as well as for education.

Back-up for these thoughts came last week in a letter from Jean Edmiston, one of Scotland’s leading storytellers and a long-term colleague and friend of mine.  Jean has worked widely and over a long period of years in schools, with community groups and in performance. Her letter gives her thoughts on why storytelling in education is of such value. It includes insightful references to adults and children she’s worked with.

Jean Edmiston writes:

Dear Mary

At the end of last year I visited the local village primary school to tell stories.

As there are only 26 children in the whole school, ages 5-11, I suggested they should all join in with the first story, with the older children lending their voices to the sound effects necessary to rid the villagers in the story of a scary mud monster. The story ends with the people celebrating their victory by making fires that sparkle like all the stars in the sky.

The younger children then chose to stay on for the longer stories – and 45 minutes became over an hour with everyone enjoying the stories. And I so enjoyed telling the stories and being reminded how much delight children take from hearing stories told.

A few days after this I met a parent in the village shop – and the talk was not the usual talk about the weather but about the stars and stories of how they came to be. (more…)