Storytelling: Banishing the Nightmares

With World Book Day coming up in just over a month on March 6^th, it’s a good time to take a fresh look at how you go about sharing books and stories with children. Maybe you’re a story-reader. Maybe you’re a story-teller. Perhaps you feel good at it. Perhaps you feel rubbish. But for me, a key question is what you think about getting the children involved.

For some people, it’s a nightmare if the children remain totally blank and unresponsive. For others, the nightmare is the dread of chaos with everyone shouting out, squabbling and wriggling about. Whatever the reality in your experience, getting participation is an art that’s worth looking at. Whether you’re reading or telling, there are tricks and techniques involved. Learning them makes presenting a story hugely more enjoyable for you as the adult. Even more important, it makes it massively better for your audience.

The trouble is that so many people take the art of reading or telling for granted – as if we all grow up knowing how to do it. One person I’ve never forgotten was ordered to do Story-Time on Day One of her career as a Nursery Nurse. She didn’t yet know the children. She didn’t know the books they had in the classroom. She’d made no preparations. Not surprisingly, she felt terribly nervous. Even less surprisingly, she made a hash of it. Many years later, her gut memory told her how awful an experience it was. It’s why, much further up in her career, she used to employ me to come and give storytelling training to Early Years staff in her borough.

Over the coming weeks, my weekly Storytelling Starters blog is providing a resource which I hope will be helpful if you work in Early Years – or, for that matter, with older children. Whatever the age of the listener, the techniques are very much the same. So whether you tell stories orally or read them from books, the idea is to give you a tip a week on how to get your children involved in active, participative listening. No more blank, unresponsive faces. No more unmanageable chaos. Check out my tips on www.storyworks.org.uk/wordpress.

Mary publishes a weekly storytelling Blog. It can be accessed from her website:www.storyworks.org.uk.