Storytelling and Story-Reading in Early Years

How to Tell and Read Stories to Young Children

Mary Medlicott

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781784506049
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

When a practitioner can tell and read stories well, it is proven to significantly improve young children's early communication and literacy. In this easy-to-read and essential guide, storytelling trainer Mary Medlicott gives professionals the tools to get the best out of oral storytelling and story-reading sessions, with management, performance and language techniques.

Included are examples of stories and post-story activities that are most successful with children of ages 2 to 5. Medlicott shows how to prepare for the session, spark children's imagination with props, voices and facial expressions, and encourage empathy with thoughtful use of language and variety. Importantly, she gives practical advice on how to cater for all learning needs, such as children with hearing impairment or learning difficulties, and children who are learning English as a second language.

1

THE IMPORTANCE
OF STORY

Stories are all around us. They’re in books and paintings, on TV and in films, in our dreams and day-dreams and in our conversations. Where would we be without them?

Imagine: It’s Friday evening. You get together with friends for a quick drink before the weekend. Almost immediately, you’re hearing a story. What happened when one friend’s car broke down at midnight on the way home from a visit to her mother? What happened when another friend’s child was terribly sick in the middle of the night? What happened when a third friend’s cat went missing for four whole days? It’s all very absorbing. One story sparks off another; it’s the stuff of life but you probably don’t normally ask yourself what life would be like without it.

Then it’s Saturday night. You go to the cinema with your partner. The film you both wanted to see is a thriller. You’re on the edge of your seat. Can you bear it? When you come out, you’re talking about it. What was actually going on – remember? – when those two robbers were talking in that bar? Was she really in love with him by then? It’s funny how much we take for granted. If films had never been invented, what would we do on a Saturday night?

By now, it’s the middle of the week, Wednesday morning. You’ve had to take time off work. There’s a family funeral you’ve got to attend. Everyone present is sad but there’s a lot of good humour too. Grandma was old, she’d had a good life, and at the tea and sandwiches after the service, you all stand around and remember. You recall those times when you were all children and Grandma would astonish you and make you laugh with those tales of her growing up. You remember when you were teenagers and she never minded when you dyed your hair, she liked it. You remember once when she got furious because one of her neighbours had kicked her cat.

EVERYDAY TALES

All this talking is part of storytelling. It’s the informal part, the stuff of ordinary everyday living, and it’s well worth thinking about how our lives would be if it never occurred. Of course, for some people, not much of it does. People isolated by mobility problems, loss of family and friends or lack of money. People with depression, hearing loss or serious illness. People who’ve been obliged to move home or country and, perhaps because of language problems, haven’t made any friends where they live now. Or people who are terribly shy. Besides, it’s not everyone who is able to tell their stories even if they’ve got someone to tell them to. I remember one young mother on a storytelling course I was running. Towards the end of the term, she reported feeling very moved. She told me why. Before she came on the course, she said, her husband had never really said anything about his life before he met her, his childhood or growing up days. She and their children knew little about him. Now, responding to all the different kinds of stories she’d passed on to him from the course, he’d started talking, telling them things. They were learning much more about him. His wife felt grateful for the change.

TRADITIONAL TALES

Our life stories are vital. We wouldn’t be human without them. But in the vast store of the world’s stories, they form only one department. Others are comprised of the myths and legends, the folk tales and fairy tales, tall tales, jokes and riddles that people have shared in all the different parts of the world where human beings have lived going back to the beginnings of spoken language. It can be daunting even to think about it. Ancient Greek stories of the gods and goddesses. Old Norse sagas of mighty heroes. The Arabian Nights from the Middle East, the Mahabharata from India, the Mabinogion from Wales. Tales from the Americas, Iceland, Russia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, you name it: every part of the world has its stories. Some, such as the folk tales that were collected and published in 19th-century Germany by the Brothers Grimm, will be more familiar to more of us in the West. Others will remain outside our consciousness. Yet insofar as they’ve been passed on, whether in published or oral form, they continue to affect the cultures of the world as these exist today. Poets, novel writers and film-makers will have been influenced by them. So will the creators of children’s computer games.

TALES WE CREATE

Stories we create for ourselves form another important section in the immeasurable world of storytelling. It’s probably not a branch of storytelling that most people think of as having anything at all to do with them. Isn’t making up stories what authors do, novelists and children’s book writers and people like that? Yes. But it’s also what the dreamers among us do when we imagine different lives for ourselves – how we might meet the love of our life and settle down in a lovely old house in the country with a dog and some cats – and oh, how about some children? Or how about our career ambitions – how we might get to run a bookshop one day or maybe even write a best-seller? And what about that strange dream you had last night? Where did that come from? Didn’t it come from somewhere inside you?

I could go on. Even as we refer to our everyday tales of our own lives, it’s possible to make a connection with history-writers and how they form our knowledge of the past. Digging into the archives of recorded events, researching previously unrecorded aspects of them, they have their own special understanding of the importance of story.

WHY STORIES ARE IMPORTANT

This book deals with the importance of stories for the full range of early years children with particular focus on three-to five-year-olds. It will cover two different ways of passing on stories, namely oral storytelling (telling a story without a book) and story-reading (reading a story from a written text, though perhaps with some rewording or ad-libbing). Yet, even as growing young children are at the centre of the book’s concerns, the book itself must inevitably be addressed to the adults in their lives. It is written for people who work with children – teachers, nursery nurses, special assistants, speech and language specialists, psychotherapists, lunchtime assistants and supervisors – and also parents, foster parents and carers. For the concern of the book is how we as adults can help to give children the joyous and ever-expanding familiarity with stories that will form a positive basis for their development as human beings.

LEARNING AND DIGESTING

For a start, stories give a firm basis for the learning of language: stories normally (though not always) employ words, some of which might be new to an early years audience. Yet those words always come in a context, a framework which offers its own clues to the children who hear them as to what the words mean and how they are used. Then again, stories teach shape: they have beginnings and endings and middles. Shapes are useful because they give patterns and patterns are useful because they help us to understand what happens to us. Besides, the shapes of stories are more than architectural. They come with content, which includes emotions, and we all have to work hard to understand our own emotions let alone those of other people. Further to all of that, all stories are some kind of journey. Experiencing the journey, however long or short, involves discovering that, after it has started, it will sooner or later have an end. This discovery is highly productive for all kinds of things in the rest of life. Lessons, mealtimes, sitting on buses: accepting that stories have beginnings and ends teaches you about getting through time and, by the by, how to look out for something that might interest you along the way.

THE VALUE OF STORIES

Becoming aware of the value of stories is essential for anyone who works or lives with children. Children need things that help them to understand what is going on in their own lives: basic things such as happiness and sadness, difficulties with engaging with parents and teachers, siblings and friends. Children also need things that engage them, make them laugh, awaken their imagination. All these can be gained from stories. And that’s where the ways in which you offer stories to children become so important. Stories are like food for children. But you can’t shove food down children’s throats. Stories have to be offered to children in ways they can cope with and also enjoy. Stories are not a punishment, not something to be endured, and they shouldn’t be surrounded with instructions: ‘Sit still. Sit up. Listen.’ Stories need to be communicated in the spirit of discovery which makes them feel like an adventure. They also need to be communicated in the spirit of creating relationships. As pioneer storyteller Eileen Colwell (1980, p.3) described it, ‘When storyteller and child meet, life is enriched for both by the sharing of a story. To have laughed together, shared excitement or sadness, experienced wonder and emotion, establishes a mutual feeling of warmth and comradeship, an experience worth all that it may cost in time and energy.’

WHAT THIS BOOK OFFERS

What this book offers is an opportunity to think about all the many aspects of how we can communicate stories to children. It offers suggestions on what kinds of stories might be best for children across the early years age range. It offers advice on how these stories might be presented both to a child on her or his own and to children in groups. It offers suggestions about how early years staff can prepare themselves for delivering their stories, whether through books or through oral telling. It talks about props and how these can be selected and used to add to the enjoyment and understanding of stories. Then it goes on to discuss how staff can help each other in regard to delivering the stories, how this can relate to parents and how these elements can be involved in building an overall strategy for dealing with stories in any early years setting.

MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Where the book offers something fresh is that it deals both with story-reading and oral storytelling. As someone who has done a great deal of both, I have considerable experience of the links between them and the differences too. My first experience of both was during four years’ part-time work on a scheme being run at that time in Brixton in South London where I live. The Lambeth Libraries Storytelling Scheme was highly innovative and it involved two different types of work. One was as a story reader going round under-fives groups in the borough on a regular basis to deliver story sessions. The other involved telling stories without using books to children of all ages who turned up for sessions on holiday schemes in the borough. The work was very part-time, not many hours per week and certainly not much pay. But from the very beginning, it seemed to offer me a remarkable opportunity to find out at first hand what kind of stories children respond to. For some years previously, I’d been working as a freelance journalist and my regular work had included reviewing children’s books for a variety of newspapers and magazines. Alas, when you’re reviewing books for children, you’re not writing for the children themselves. You are writing for their teachers and parents. The Lambeth scheme would, I thought, provide a chance to discover for myself what children do and don’t like.

I was right. Working for the Lambeth Libraries Storytelling Scheme (sadly long since defunct because of lack of funding) taught me a very great deal. It taught me about young children and how to get and keep their attention. It taught me about choosing which stories to select from among the huge variety of available picture books. It also taught me a lot about the people who work with young children. One result was completely unexpected. The realisation that books themselves do not speak and that you have to find ways to give them a voice made me learn about presenting stories to children. It also led me into realising how useful it could be to pass this on to other adults. There was, I found out, a big need for this. Story-reading and storytelling are hugely important but not much discussed among the adults who live and work with the children.

After leaving the Lambeth scheme, I began to develop a new career as an oral storyteller. A large part of my subsequent work was in education, working with children in nurseries, primary and secondary schools, and also with their teachers and carers. In Lambeth I’d already discovered the links and differences between story-reading and storytelling. Now, as an oral storyteller, I also became what I might describe as a proselytiser, someone who felt very keen to spread the word about oral storytelling and how vital it can be. Along with the many colleagues who also became part of what we’d now describe as the Storytelling Revival, I felt I wanted to encourage others to do it too, whether as fellow professionals or in their own working or personal lives. Storytelling, it seems true to say, had been dying out. Now we wanted others to experience the extraordinary atmosphere of hearing stories told ‘by word of mouth’, perhaps by someone sitting quietly in a chair using words alone, perhaps with action and music as part of the telling.

I shall certainly do my share of proselytising in this book. However, I shall not do it by downgrading the act of story-reading. Story-reading and oral storytelling provide somewhat different kinds of experience. Both are hugely important for young children and there are many common issues in regard to both types of activity. How to choose a story, how to prepare it, how to get and keep children’s attention to it and how often to tell it: all are crucial whether you are reading or telling. But those are just the beginning. Beyond are the wider issues of how you embed the stories in children’s lives, how you can create interesting activities that relate to the stories and at the same time assist children in their language and social development. In a way, it’s like being a cook. Beyond the question of the particular dish you’re going to serve this evening – its particular ingredients, the method of cooking and the time that will be needed – are all those other issues we read so much about today. What is your overall diet of which this particular recipe is part? Is it doing you good? Is your choice of ingredients healthy, for yourself, for any others who are going to eat the food you serve and for the wider world?

When I was working all those years ago on the Lambeth Libraries Storytelling Scheme, I came to realise that one major factor in the background of the scheme was not being given due attention. This was the people who regularly worked with the children. What did they think was going on? Did they like what their visiting story readers did or did they think they could do it better? Would they have liked to get more involved? Would they even have liked some help to improve their own performance? Questions such as these led to my later interest in what you might call staff training except that, to me, staff training in working with stories should always be as much about opening up to the experience of the staff concerned as about delivering instruction.

HOW WE ADULTS CAN HELP EACH OTHER

A running theme in this book is how adults in any early years setting can help each other in the job of delivering stories to children. Can more experienced adults assist people new to the work by discussing what stories work best and how to make those stories work? If one member of staff is experienced in the oral telling of stories, could she or he help others to do it too, perhaps by discussing how to get started and by giving some tips? Not that any one way is best. Whether reading or orally telling, some people are loud and active, others are quiet and still. Either style can be highly effective. That’s why I always feel a bit worried when I hear a staff member saying of someone else at the other end of a corridor, ‘Oh, she’s brilliant at telling stories.’ The remark (often made) always seems to me to imply, ‘And I’m not’. What a pity! Joint interest in storytelling and story-reading can be developed across any setting, along with the teaching of techniques such as how to settle children at the beginning of a story session, and sou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1. The Importance of Story
• 2. Varieties of Story
• 3. Preparing Yourself
• 4. Thinking about Your Audience
• 5. Props
• 6. Dealing with Your Audience
• 7. After the Story
• 8. Creating a Strategy for Story
• 9. Consolidating
• Appendix 1: Stories and Rhymes
• Appendix 2: Classic Stories and Picture Books
• Bibliography
• Index
• Join Our Mailing List
• Coyright
• Of Related Interest