Perhaps one of the most important things I have learned from the whole WRITE course came from Chris Smith, Director of Storytelling Schools. He explained the following triangle:
The ‘u’ stands for understanding; the ‘v’, for valuing and the ‘c’ for choosing. They are three things to pay attention to when there’s resistance to learning. In other words we learn well when we understand the task; when we feel valued and when there is an element of choice. A lack of understanding leads to fear; a lack of value leads to sadness or depression and a lack of choice leads to anger. When these three are balanced and positive people are receptive, motivated and willing. I have added the heart as I believe it is at the heart of all we do when managing children or adults. So often since learning this have I applied the principle to the decisions I make as a teacher both for the children in my care or adults when I am in a position of leadership. It has also helped me to understand when the learning is not going well or the morale in the staffroom is low. It has given me a structure to anchor my thinking and work out how to alleviate problems. Chris Smith works a lot with disaffected, troubled children but I have learned that it is a great principle to apply in most situations – I might add including at home with my family!
By teaching the children to write from the starting point of telling a story I have discovered the quality of their writing has improved significantly. Many would argue that the teaching of writing through story telling is the key to raising standards. The children in my class now have some story lines embedded which impact their own story writing without them even realising. I’ve also grabbed the principle of the multi-sensory learning style and used it in other areas of the curriculum. With story-telling, the children listen and then ‘step’ (move) and then ‘map’ (draw). The act of stepping forwards as if on stepping stones to help your brain to remember the stages in the story is a principle I have also used in maths for learning times tables. With each calculation they take a step forwards and it has been extremely helpful in aiding memory.
In addition to aiding memory I have also learnt how much more I can get from the children once they have a story embedded. The planning of lessons becomes easy once it’s all based around one story line. They are able to draw from pre-ordained structures, characters and settings, even if they do go on to embellish or innovate with their own ideas. As will become clear from the work described below, once a story has been learnt, I can then go on to tackle different writing genres using the same theme. So when they had learnt ‘The Freedom Bird’, my planning included a newspaper report on the story; a play script between two of the characters and also an interview. We have also written persuasive letters and speeches and diary entries all relating to the same story.
With each story there is a pattern to the teaching. First of all, having learnt the story myself I tell it. In the telling I involve the children where possible for the minor details. So for example when the hunter makes a stew from the Freedom bird, the children told me what other ingredients he added to the pot. They also came up with a few actions to accompany the repeating words such as the Hunter. Then the children step out the stages of the story; moving a step forwards with each new occurrence. For the more able I challenge them to split the story into a certain number of steps. Following this they map it out with little diagrams and symbols to stand for each stage (appendix VIII). Using their symbols they practise telling the story to each other or we perform as a class to an audience – the school secretary… whoever is passing! I believe some teachers at this point would then have a go at writing the story but I found with my year 4s this was not motivating once they had learnt it by heart.
The next stage is to deepen and innovate. Using a scene from the story we might hot-seat a character; or devise a live news broadcast. In the case of the Freedom Bird the children played the part of the two fishermen and argued about the box floating in the river.
|
The document (right) shows the result of a newspaper report based on the story. Using the deconstruct/reconstruct method described above we looked at articles and the genre features. We put them back together again; I modelled how to write one and then we wrote in groups with adults. There is one morning a week when I have two teaching assistants and one extra teacher who supports the 8 children entitled to pupil premium. So every child was able to group write. This is an example of how story telling can benefit the more able writers. I led the group as we wrote and you can see from the language and grammar choices just how challenging the exercise was. We used the right click function on the lap top to choose synonyms as the group were keen to extend their vocabulary.
Once the article was printed each child highlighted the words that were new to them and looked them up in the dictionary (right) in order to place them in sentences of their own.
|
|
Ray, who has funding for classroom support was able to also innovate the story. He wrote about the stew that the hunter made (right). His understanding of content and order is a challenge for Ray and there has been a marked impact on his ability to access the curriculum as a direct result of story-telling. He is able to listen and respond to stories that are told and the multi-sensory approach helps him with memory. I have seen with Ray just how true it is that a child needs to know a story before he can write one. There has been a knock on effect from the way we support him in other lessons too. Whereas before we would create a sentence with him, scribing for him to copy as we go; we now get him to create and ‘know’ his sentence off by heart before he writes. Then, one sentence at a time we construct a piece together. His understanding of sentence structure has also been heightened through using this method.
|
To this day the children in my class can re-tell the stories with all the accompanying actions and I see morsels from the stories in their own creative pieces which I don’t even think they realise they are drawing from.
The teaching staff in the school have embraced story-telling in their own classes. All teachers’ plans now include stories and work emanating from them. After leading two staff meetings on the subjects of de-constructing texts and also story-telling, the deputy head came in to work the next day to tell me with great excitement that he had gone home and re-written his writing lesson plans.