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Look & Listen to our 2005-2006 Storytellers |
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The Clow School Storytellers work through a ten week
program to gain and develop their storytelling skills. Once they have
completed the ten weeks, they are ready to PERFORM! The rest of the year
our storytellers learn new stories and prepare for our annual
storytelling festival. |
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Selecting a new story that the teller is going to like
a lot and want to practice for months is the most important part. Once
that's done, tellers draw out their story in eight scenes on a
storyboard. |
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They sequence the events and use lots of details and colors so that they can visualize the story
as they tell it. |
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Once the storyboards are finished, tellers partner up
and tell the bones of their story. They tell it ugly again and
again, switching partners. Their story becomes more and more comfortable
to tell. |
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The next step is to tell it to the wall. This
is a great way to practice and the wall can be anything like a
boxcar full of shelf markers, a post, or a window. At home a wall can be
a stuffed animal, a real animal or a mirror. |
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Tellers use different
techniques to perfect a story and make it their own. Have you ever tried
taking a sentence of narrative text and making it into dialogue?
This is fun to do as a whole group as tellers turn to a partner and try
it out. Then the tellers look at their own stories and decide on any
changes they can make. |
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Try taking an everyday sentence like
"I don't believe that I told you that." and emphasizing one word. When
you emphasize a word the meaning can be made clearer to your
listeners. |
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Listening to what your audience hears
is a skill we develop too. After all, we want our listeners to
understand AND enjoy our stories.
Clow storytellers learn a lot of ways
to improve their stories. They practice every day, every week, whenever
they can and the stories get better and better. After all, that's what
storytelling is all about, the story! |
