The first few times we meet, we get to know each
other. It's important to be comfortable as we learn our stories. A bond quickly develops
between the members of the storytelling community at Clow School.
Sometimes we need to meet wherever there is space
so our meeting location might be in the LMC or lab or even a classroom. This year we meet
one morning a week and at lunch time as we get closer to performance time.
The process of becoming a storyteller at Robert
Clow Elementary School is exciting. We start out searching for the perfect story to tell.
It needs to be one that the teller will want to tell again and again. We really need to
like it a lot!
Then we work our stories out together. Filling out
storyboards and telling what we know of the basic story to each other.
Once we think we have our stories worked out pretty
well, we start telling them to anything, even the windows and books on the shelves.
Sometimes the wall is our best listener! Even better is a human audience.
We tell to each other while lined up in a
"reel" formation. This idea came from Judy Sima's book (see Resources).
We tell our stories to each other
a lot!
When the storytellers are ready to tell their
stories to new listeners we make sure they have an audience to tell to and away they go!
Stacy told her version of Mirabella the Clever
and got the first graders involved. We make sure that students practice whatever they plan
on doing with their real audience a few times before the actual performance. Stacy found
out that working with first graders who have never heard the story is much different than
practicing with her storytelling buddies who know what to do next.
Everyone has learned a great deal and had a lot of
fun at the same time. We have discovered that we are all storytellers!
