Stories of Ecology
Brody, Ed, Jay Goldspinner, Katie Green, Rona Leventhal and John Porcino, eds. "Living with the Earth." In Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope: stories of Peace, Justice and the Environment, 201-55. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.
Caduto, Michael J. and Joseph Bruchac. Keepers of the Animals: Native
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American Stories and Wildlife Activities for Children. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing Inc., 1991.
Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and
Environmental Activities for Children. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing Inc., 1988.
Schimmel, Nancy. "Ecology Stories, Songs, and Sources." In Just Enough to Make a Story, 50-52. Berkeley, California: Sisters' Choice Press, 1992.
Stories for Peace
Brody, Ed, Jay Goldspinner, Katie Green, Rona Leventhal and John Porcino, eds. "Living with the Earth." In Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope: Stories of Peace, Justice and the Environment, 201-55. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992.
MacDonald, Margaret Read. Peace Tales: World Folktales to Talk About. Hamden, Connecticut: Linnet Books / The Shoe String Press, 1992.
Schimmel, Nancy. "Stories in Service to Peace." In Just Enough to Make a Story. Berkeley, California: Sisters' Choice Press, 1992.
Stories Featuring Strong Women
Barchers, Suzanne I. Wise Women: Folk and Fairy Tales from Around the World. Littleton, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1990.
Carter, Angela. The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.
McCarty, Toni. The Skull in the Snow. New York: Delacorte Press, 1981.
Minard, Rosemary. Womenfolk and Fairy Tales. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975.
Phelps, Ethel Johnston. The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.
Schimmel, Nancy. "Active Heroines in Folktales." In Just Enough to Make a Story. Berkeley, California: Sisters' Choice Press, 1992.
Zipes, Jack. Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Teaching Others to Tell
A human being who achieves his own truth through the act and the quality of his doing and his being becomes the seed of new growth.
—Laurens van der Post. A Walk with a White Bushman
You are but one in a long line of owners of this story. Now that the tale truly belongs to you, it is your duty to pass it on. How do you do that? By telling it to others and encouraging them to go tell it. And by teaching the tale to others. I have developed a very simple method for teaching a tale to a group. It seems to work well with my students. You might try it with yours.
Tell your story. Be sure the audience takes full part in the story's participatory chants. They are going to have to tell the entire story soon, so the more they learn on this first telling, the better. Encourage lots of body language too, if this is appropriate to the story. The gestures help fix the story in memory. They can be dropped later if they don't fit the telling style of this individual.
Talk through the entire story again. Point out the tale's structure as you go. Encourage the class to speak as much of the story with you as possible. They should already know chants, repetitive phrases, and dialogues from the first listening.
Break your class into small groups. The ideal group site is three to six students. Assign one person in each group to begin telling the story. At a given signal from you (hand clap or hell) each group's beginning teller starts the story: "Once
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there was a boy named Jack...."
After a few moments, when you clap your hands again, the beginning teller will stop talking and the person to his or her left will pick up the tale right where it was left off. In this way the tale passes around the small group circle. Keep signaling for the next teller to take a turn until the story is done. This gives each person a chance to practice remembering the story in a nonthreatening environment. It also lets them hear others' interpretations of the tale. By the time the students have heard your telling of the story, talked through the story, and retold the story, they essentially know the story. Give each student a copy of the tale and encourage them to tell it again as soon as possible and as often as possible.
If your class is focused on performance technique as well as story learning, you can use a similar group telling method to let them retell the story for your class at a later meeting, after they have each developed their own telling of the story. Let five students stand in front of the class. At a signal, the first student begins the tale; at the next signal that student falls silent and another student picks up the story and continues it. In this way several students can perform and receive simple critiquing in a short amount of time, again in a relatively nonthreatening environment.
I use these same techniques when teaching a story to either adults or children. Children, however, are often eager to move the story into dramatic play. After retelling the story in our small groups, we sometimes rework the story once more, this time as story theater. Whether working with children or with adults, it is important to stress that your students should go home and tell the story to someone else.
Now those to whom you taught the story are part of the chain of tellers and it is their responsibility to pass it on!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bauer, Caroline Feller. "Teaching Children to Tell Stories." In Read for the Fun of It: Active Programming with Books for Children, 126-65. New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1992.
Griffin, Barbara Budge. Student Stoutest: flow to Organize a Storytelling Festival. Medford, Oregon: Barbara Budge Griffin, 10 S. Keeneway Dt , Medford, OR 97504, 1989.
. Students as Storytellers: The Long and the Short of
Learning a Story. Medford, Oregon: Barbara Budge Griffin, 10S. Keeneway Dr., Medford, OR 97504, 1989. Includes eighteen activities for the classroom designed to teach storytelling skills. Griffin includes a list of learning objectives fulfilled for each activity.
Hamilton, Martha and Mitch Weiss. Children Tell Stories: A Teaching Guide. Katonah, New York: Richard C. Owen Publishers Inc., 1990. This excellent advice on learning stories can be used by the beginning teller for self-instruction first. Then let this be a starting point for your task of teaching your students to tell.
Herman, Gail N. Storytelling: A Triad in the Arts. Mansfield Center, Connecticut: Creative Learning Press, 1986. The aim of this program is to "acquaint interested students with techniques that blend storytelling with other art forms—music, movement, and mime." Interesting advice and useful bibliographies.
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Telling it Everywhere
My parents, Charley and Louise Anderson, told stories and historical information to each other all the time, just to remind and refresh themselves.
—Vi Hilbert, Upper Skagit elder in Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound
The uses of story are many. Anywhere a group is gathered together with a moment of quietude to listen, or an eagerness to share, story may occur. You really need only two people for story—a teller and a listener. And stories will delight any age. Do not limit yourself to one audience; experiment, stretch yourself ... share story everywhere!
Who Do You Tell To?
Storytelling to Preschoolers
Storytell to preschoolers? Of course!
They are really never too little to listen. Even babies will often perch transfixed on a parent's lap, their eyes glued to yours as you tell. The preschooler demands more of your attention, of course. Your eyes must be constantly roaming t he group, touching every face and drawing each listener back into the story over and over again. Nothing is taken for granted with the preschooler.
The group may be enthralled with Jack's encounter with the dog, but before he meets the story's cat a live ant may crawl across the floor and take your audience's attention with it. Be flexible. Help the ant out the door and continue the story. Lots of audience in
volvement helps the preschoolers keep their limited attention fixed on you and the story. Karen really wants to hear what happens to Jack next ... but Jenny's hairbow is so interesting she has to touch it and Jenny turns
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around and speaks to her and Karen answers hack and ...
To help both Jenny and Karen keep their attention on the tale, involve them with verbal responses, movement, or song repeatedly throughout your story. Sometimes my tales become audience participation when shared with preschoolers through the sheer desperation of the moment!
Primary School Children
This is the perfect age for story listening. These children are still innocent enough to accept all with wonder yet clever enough to guess at a story's ending and develop a sense of plot. And such creativity! Let them act it, draw it, sing it, dance it! Story follow-ups are a joy with these kids.
Upper Elementary School Children
These listeners are becoming just a little worldly, so be sure your stories have enough substance to interest them. Once they get the habit of story listening these students will enjoy almost any well-told tale. They can follow more complicated plots now and appreciate more subtle humour. And their improvisational skills have developed to the point where they can retell or reenact the tales with great effectiveness. Writing skills are developed too by now, so stories can become springboards to help the students' own imaginings spill onto paper.
Junior High and High School Students
Middle-school and high-school audiences can be tough nuts to crack. Of course they love a good tale as much as the rest of us—once they get over their natural instinct that this might be uncool. Look for tales which deal with topics which concern them—love, death, anger, the outsider, youth vs. age. Many fine stories are made to order for this group, but some of the tales which engage teens may be quieter, lengthier, and more difficult to learn than primary school fare.
Several tellers have found urban legends to be a sure-fire entry into storytelling with teens. These simple ghastly tidbits need no special language and work well when retold in your own first-person voice. Read through Jan Harold Brunvand's collections to prime your pump, then start collecting urban legends from your acquaintances. Your most successful tellings will likely come from those about which you can honestly say, "This happened to a friend of a friend." See page 49 for a listing of Brunvand's books, and page 48 for resources on using story with teens.
Another way to ease teens into story listening is to arrange a workshop on storytelling. Drama, child care, or literature classes can easily incorporate a unit on storytelling. Under the guise of learning how to tell, the teens will buy into the most outrageous children's tales with delight. Audience participation tales such as "Jack and the Robbers" and "The Teeny Weeny Bop" turn teen boys into masters of improv. Teenage girls are often too conscious of their image to cut loose at first, but after a few sessions they too begin to give in to story play.
Adults
Well-told personal stories, myths, tales of the fabulous ... many story genres offer keys to our lives. The adult's sense of story is fully developed, the attention span is long, and adults prove eager listeners if you will take the time to seek out and perform the tales we need to hear.
Be mindful that adults need to play, too. The same tale that delights your second-graders may open your adult audience to much-needed play.
Where Shall You Tell?
In the Library
For the first sixty years of this century it was mainly librarians and teachers who kept storytelling in the public eye on this continent. Using story as an enticement to reading, public librarians offered regular story programs. School librarians made storytelling a part of their curriculum. And a few persistent teachers shared story regularly in their classrooms.
In today's stressful workplace storytelling is often abandoned for easier pursuits. Craft programs replace storytelling
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in the public libraries. Videotapes solve programming needs for the school librarian. Reading aloud seems an adequate effort for the classroom teacher.
But there is still a joy to be found in sharing tales with children in school and public libraries. Story still entices children into books. It still leaves them with positive feelings about the library setting and—not unimportantly—with a generous feeling toward the librarian! And of course, exposure to story can't help but improve their own listening and speaking skills. Perhaps equally important is the child's need to hear stories for his or her own emotional and personal development.
So make time for story in your library. Public librarians can include one story in every program. Plan your craft programs to begin with books, poems, and a told story. Tell stories in your preschool storytimes—perhaps not every week, but plug in a good tale now and then. And for special occasions, still offer those lovely "story hour" programs in which children can come to just sit and listen to one fine tale after another.
All this is not as demanding as it sounds. You do not need to learn tons of new stories for each program. Pick a few favorites and keep them in use. Learn one or two new stories every year and add them to your repertoire. An entire "story hour"—more usually around forty-five minutes in length—needs only two or three tales, a song, a couple of poems, and a story stretch. And these can be the same tales that you used in that preschool storytime and told for the craft program last winter. Just recycle and keep telling.
In the Church
Tell stories from the pulpit, in the Sunday school, at family gatherings, with men's and women's groups, with youth groups, at camp. Over the ages, stories have been one of mankind's most effective tools for passing on moral instruction. They still carry this power to impress young minds and stimulate thoughtful consideration.
In the Parks and Recreation Center
Story is a good activity for building group rapport. The shared adventure of a story and the bonding of audience participation help strengthen group identity.
Story can be used to soothe a group, to relax them during their "down time." Or on the other hand, audience partipation story play, like that of the tales in this book, can be used to energize a group, prepare them for action, or simply release energy.
In the Nursing Home or Adult Day-Care Center
Simple, repetitive stories please and energize elderly listeners. Stories which recall their childhood strike a chord in memory. Audience-involving chants and songs can sometimes draw a welcome bit of group play from these audiences.
For nursing homes with a clientele who are infirm but whose memories are intact, your usual repertoire of stories will be well received. Just be sure to speak loudly and slowly enough for all to hear. Hearing loss is a definite factor to be coped with in these settings. A microphone can help when working with groups of twenty or more.
In the Home
Storytelling in the home can be as simple as sharing the events of the day, recounting tales of relative's lives, or sharing a memory from your own childhood. Many parents love to make up fanciful stories at bedtime, letting their own imaginations run wild, often incorporating their own children into the story. The folktale, of course, is still a staple of home storytelling. Begin by telling those you remember hearing as a child and add more tales as you read and discover.
The most important element of home storytelling is that of making time for story. Don't let these special private moments be crowded out of your family's busy life. Look for storytelling opportunities, plan storytelling moments, and take time to tell.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Religious Storytelling
Licht, Jacob. Storytelling in the Bible. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1978. For the serious bibical scholar. An analysis of the storytelling techniques of the Bible's authors.
White, William R. Stories for Telling: A Treasury for Christian Storytellers. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1986. llseful selection of tales and a chapter on "Storytelling in t
he Ministry."
Williams, Michael E. The Storyteller's Companion to the Bible. Volume One. Genesis. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991.
. The Storytellers' Companion to the Bible. Volume
Two. Exodus-Joshua. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992. This and the entry above include story selections from The Revised English Bible, comments on each story, a sample elaborated retelling, and a few related Midrashim for each.
Story Programs for the Public Library
Baker, Augusta and Ellin Greene. Storytelling: Art and Technique. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1977.
Bauer, Caroline Feller. Celebrations. New York: The H.W. Wilson Co., 1985.
. Handbook for Storytellers. Chicago: American Li-
brary Association, 1977.
. This Way to Books. New York: The H.W. Wilson Co.,
1983.
De Wit, Dorothy. Children's Faces Looking Up: Program Building for the Storyteller. Chicago: American Library Association, 1979. Suggested story groupings on many themes and a chapter on "The Elements of Programming."
Iarusso, Marilyn. Stories: A List of Stories to Tell and Read Aloud. New York: New York Public Library, 1990.
Shaw, Spencer G. "First Steps: Storytime With Young Listeners." In Start Early for an Early Start: You and the Young Child, edited by Ferne Johnson, 4 1-64 . Chicago: American Library Association, 1976.
Telling Stories to Adults
Chinn, Allan B. In the Ever After: Fairy Tales and the Second Half of Life. Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications, 1989. Fifteen traditional tales featuring elders. Each accompanied by Jungian analysis. An interesting book with good tale selection.
. Once Upon a Midlife: Classic Stories and Mythic
Tales to Illuminate the Middle Years. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1992.
The Story-Teller's Start-Up Book Page 5