Every Child A Talker
Welcome to my blog. One main idea behind this blog is for people to share their experiences of storytelling without a book. So if you’re reading this after any of my workshops, do write a reply to say what it was like if you tried out any of my stories. Did the children like it? What did they say? And how did you feel about it? Were you scared? Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing workshops with teachers and Nursery Nurses in Barnet – there’s more to come over the next couple of weeks – and it’s been such an enjoyable experience to meet really responsive children and very interested and enthusiastic staff. One story that’s been going down well as always is the famous Mrs Wiggle and Mrs Waggle. This is an old traditional action chant and I think all young children should get to know it because they love it so much when they do. Follow it up with storymaps and other activities and it really gets children involved in creating their own ideas. Just like Going On A Bear Hunt, which is another old traditional action chant, it hugely engages children’s imagination. Thanks to Michael Rosen putting it into book form, Going On A Bear Hunt has become popular again all over the country. Mrs Wiggle and Mrs Waggle deserves to be brought back too. It always works and it was a delight to hear from someone I remet in Barnet last week at the Bright Horizons Day Nursery in Beaufort Park that she’d been doing Mrs Wiggle and Mrs Waggle with the children she works with ever since she came on a workshop of mine in the past.
One of the best things about the visit to Bright Horizons was how well the toddlers responded to simple story-ideas. For instance, they loved the animal noises in the story of the fly called Eee. This is a Sri Lankan tale which was told to me once by a refugee mother. She told me that, in Tamil language, the name of the fly is Eee. In the story, the fly one day forgets his name. He goes looking for friends who might be able to remind him what it is. But they all can only speak their own animal language. When the fly asks the dog, the dog just says Woof. When he asks the cat, the cat just says Meeow. And so on and on. You can get lots of animals into the story and the children love thinking up more animals and more animal noises. At the end of course, someone has to tell the fly his name. I usually say it’s some children who know it. This allows the children in the session to remember that his name is Eee.
So please do write in with any hints or tips for other people if you’ve gone away and tried these stories or any others you’ve heard. It’s a good long road that’s there for you to travel. It can take you to lots of places. Today, for instance, I was visiting Maltman’s Green, a girls’ school near Gerrards Cross. I was delighted to re-meet a teacher who’d come to a lecture of mine several years ago: it was she who was responsible for my being invited there today. Then after doing some of my Shemi stories with the girls, another teacher came up to me and said that every year she goes to Pembrokeshire where, of course, Shemi himself used to live back in the 19th century. It turned out that this particular teacher has a caravan at a farm that I must have walked past literally hundreds of times in my life. It’s exactly where I grew up. That’s another wonderful thing about being a storyteller. You discover that life is full of lovely coincidences. I delight in spotting them!
Looking forward to hearing from you!
February 9th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
I tried one of Mary’s stories with a Year 1 class of children and it worked brilliantly-especially in terms of the creative work that took place after the story and the children’s responses to open ended questioning during the story.
The story was about the mouse who had to look for somewhere else to live whilst the farmer cut the corn in his field( and so his home was destroyed .I found that the children really focused on my hands as I changed them from a bird to a tree for example during the story and they became totally engaged in the plight of the mouse as he searched for a new home.When eventually the mouse found a new home,I posed the question”I wonder what the mouse could put in his new home….?” The children’s ideas were amazing and as a follow-up I asked the children to make a picture of the mouse’s home.The creative drawing and caption-writing that took place aftrwards were really super and I displayed the whole classes’ work on the walls with blu-tak immediately afterwards so that they could enjoy each other’s work.I was most amazed at the engagement of the boys in this activity-and all as a response of Mary’s storytelling ideas! Do try this with your children !!It really works !