School Storytelling and Training

Children love stories and I love telling stories to them.

Listening to a storyteller can stimulate their imagination and contribute to speaking and listening skills, as well as helping to develop and enrich creative writing, poetry, drama, music, art and even science.

I can prepare a session on specific themes if desired and run workshops on storytelling skills and creating stories.

Workshops for Children

My workshops can range from single fifty-minute sessions through to multi-week residencies.  They are tailored to the requirements, e.g. the age of the children and the size of the group.  I can run workshops on oracy and basic storytelling skills, on storytelling and creativity into creative writing, or a combination as required.

Basic storytelling skills

For the younger ones a short session would normally concentrate on enhancing their visualisation of scenes,using all five senses, and some spontaneous storytelling within the group.  For older children my workshops are more heavily weighted towards the learning and telling of stories.  In longer workshops or residencies I look at story structure and develop each child's individual storytelling skills and voice, and building their confidence to stand in front of an audience and tell a story.

Literacy

As well as oracy I run workshops for storytelling into literacy where I teach children creative ways to spark their imagination to come up with storytelling ideas, and then lead them through writing their stories down and enhancing them.

Arts Award

Arts Award is a national scheme to involve young people between the ages of 11 and 25 in the arts.  Participants receive a qualification at level 1, 2 or 3 on the Qualifications and Credit Framework.  I am a accredited Arts Award adviser and can take your students through the Bronze or Silver award process.

INSET

I don't just train children in storytelling skills, I train adults too. 

many people are afraid to leave the book behind and just tell.  I run workshops to improve the storytelling skills of teachers, and introducing them to many creative ways to spark children's imagination which in turn help them to become better storytellers and story creators themselves.

Storytelling, Multiculturalism and Community Cohesion

Every culture, every group and every family have stories. Whether they be traditional stories such as the Danish story of the ugly duckling or the Sudanese story of why the bat lives alone, or personal stories, each story has a message for us. We may not agree with the messages, but they should make us think.

I tell stories from all around the world. I can come in and just tell stories, illustrating the riches of world culture, or I can lead sessions where we explore the stories and their messages, asking questions such as:

• What does this story tell us about the culture it comes from?
• Is this fair?
• What's my reaction to the story and why?

As well as my bringing along stories, multi-day engagements could include exploring stories brought along by the children themselves — either traditional stories from their culture, family stories or personal stories.

Engaging With the Wider Community

There are many ways in which storytelling can be used to engage the wider community. Some ideas are:

• Interviewing older members of the community about their lives and presenting these as stories
• Collecting traditional stories from members of different groups
• Exploring the history of the local area
• Local folklore

The collected stories could be put together as a show to which the local community is invited, written down as stories and published in a book, or recorded as podcasts and distributed via a web page.