I first used ‘The Freedom Bird’ which was a text we had learnt in the Storytelling session to test out this storytelling method with my class. It was very effective, the children loved joining in and they retained the story, even being asked on the days that followed.
We covered Jack and the Beanstalk in Literacy I told the story, rather than reading straight from the book and had full audience participation from the children. Then in ability groups the children ‘mapped out’ the story where they drew each ‘key’ event with an arrow in between to connect the stages in order. We then discussed the events to check they had remembered them accurately. I then told the children that they were going to ‘step out’ the events. They had to work as a group and decide who was going to demonstrate each event. It was important that at this point the children only stepped out the key event quickly and didn’t had lots of detail. Also they didn’t need to be scripted so for eg. what they had practised to say/do might not necessary be exactly the same as when they did the final step out. Using this technique the children now remembered more detail and seemed confident with the task. This was particularly obviously with the laps. As I used this technique over different lessons I then added in other techniques such as adding adjectives, adverbs, key vocabulary around mapping images to help children use when they then stepped out. This was suitable for all abilities. Very effective! |
‘That was fun!' ‘Can we do that again?’ |