As part of our session on Storytelling, led by Chris Smith, we were shown several different story telling techniques. He started off by using the game of ‘Tell Me More’. This is a way of prompting children to give more information about particular topics. He used drama techniques, telling us to ‘walk around like your character’ and ‘ice skate like your character’. These were simple warm up techniques that allow children to use their imagination in a fun and engaging way.
He then continued by showing us the early stages of the storytelling process, as outlined in his book ‘The Storytelling Schools Handbook for Teachers’. This outlines the main 4 stages as:
After this children are encouraged to using the story as a basis to innovate and invent their own stories. This should help to support less able pupils by giving them initial plot ideas.
He then continued by showing us the early stages of the storytelling process, as outlined in his book ‘The Storytelling Schools Handbook for Teachers’. This outlines the main 4 stages as:
- Tell – this is where the children should be able to verbally recall the story to others
- Deepening – this uses drama to allow the children to explore how different characters may be feeling throughout the text
- Shared writing – this is where the teacher models rewriting the story using shared writing. This can be done by adding extra detail, or using innovation to alter the plot slightly.
- Independent writing
After this children are encouraged to using the story as a basis to innovate and invent their own stories. This should help to support less able pupils by giving them initial plot ideas.
After the storytelling session, I was eager to trial out the new techniques we had been shown.
The following week, at school, I was keen to utilise drama techniques such as ‘Tell Me More’ and ‘Walk like your animal’ and ‘Eat like your animal’ as part of our work on report texts. We encouraged the children to produce a report text on their own imaginary creatures. We modelled creating the ‘octodog’ and we encouraged the children to do the same, thinking of two animals and merging them to form one creature. There were several inventive creations, including the Pendog (penguin and dog) as well as the Chicklet (chicken and a piglet). |
|
In order to give the children ideas on the habitat of their creature etc., we encouraged them to use ‘Tell Me More’ with their partner. The children really enjoyed this (they laughed lots at the unexpected topics it brought them to) and they ended up giving lots of unexpected detail about their animals. Afterwards, we told the children to ‘Move like their animal’, ‘Eat like their animal’, all while modelling our own ‘Octodog’. The children thought it was all a game and thoroughly enjoyed this, but all the while they had been busy generating an image of their animal, which came in useful when they began to plan out the report text. I think using these ‘storytelling’ techniques for non-fiction texts was really effective in enthusing the children. Another Year 4 teacher stated, writing a ‘non-fiction’ piece no longer seemed dull and unimaginative to the children.
After using these techniques to help generate ideas, I was eager to use them with existing stories. First, I used this for our unit, ‘Stories with a Theme’ . We were looking at stories with the theme of magic, so we choose to focus on ‘The Three Wishes’. We used the ‘Hear it, Map it, Step it, Speak it’ techniques to help children to memorise and recall the story.
|
|
After hearing the story, children were quickly able to map out the story and did this with real enjoyment (see Appendix 23). They were then asked to step out the story with a partner. All the children really enjoyed the activities and were eager to present to the class. One boy told me the next day he had performed it to his parents and recorded it on his Ipad. Many children asked, ‘Can we do this again?’ The story stepping techniques were obviously successful in helping the children to recall the story as they did this with ease. In fact, by the time they came to our big write, where they had to do a description of the fairly minor character of the fisherman’s wife, the children were very enthusiastic and had lots to write.
|
|
We used this story as the basis for the children’s own stories using the theme of magic. They had to change the wishgiver, the main character and the 3 wishes granted. Their ideas were very imaginative and I think looking at the previous story in such depth, helped the lower ability children to generate ideas quickly. By the time the children came to write up their stories, I was particularly impressed by the vocabulary used by the lower ability children. For example some of my 2B writers used vocabulary such as ‘As quick as a flash’ in order to create tension (see below). From recalling the story earlier, they had memorised certain vocabulary choices and they utilised these to good effect in their own writing.
More recently, I have continued to use the techniques of ‘Hear it’, ‘Map it’, ‘Step it’, ‘Speak it’ in our unit on ‘Traditional Tales’ (right). Many of the pupils had been struggling to use paragraphs accurately in their fiction writing, so I used the technique of story mapping to help demonstrate that when writing a fiction text, a paragraph is used to demonstrate a type of change.
|
|
After reading the traditional story, ‘Why the Dog and Cat are Enemies’ (right), I encouraged the children to story map. Having practised this regularly, they were able to do this quickly and enthusiastically. I challenged one less able pupil to recall the story to the class, which he was able to do accurately. After this, I told the class they would be rewriting this story tomorrow using paragraphs. I asked the children when a new paragraph was needed in a fiction text and many were able to recall that a paragraph was needed if a new character, time or setting was used. However they struggled to identify how they would rewrite the text using paragraphs.
|
|
I then showed them my own story map of the tale and discussed how every time I used an arrow and started a new picture, this represented a change of some description (see right). It may be a new character (such as the introduction of the cat and dog), a new location (where they enter the house) or simply a new time (the next day). I then demonstrated that some of these paragraphs could be joined together, such as ‘The next day, the cat and dog….’ to avoid overly short paragraphs. I modelled splitting the story map into 5 or 6 main paragraphs, identifying where paragraphs would be used on the map itself. They all took to this quickly and seemed to understand the visual nature of the task. The structure of their story writing was much improved, with some of my more able writers despite previously struggling to use paragraphs correctly, now starting to link paragraphs together. I was impressed by the texts they managed to produce, as they were packed full of description (below).
|
|
On future occasions, when planning their own texts, I have found certain pupils using the story map approach without prompt to identify where paragraphs should be used (see right). As one pupil said, ‘It helps me to organise my thoughts easier this way’. The fact it had only been modelled once and yet so many pupils responded to this approach testifies to its value. I will definitely be using this combination of storytelling and deconstruction in future.
|