My Best course - Telling stories
Monday, May 16, 2016
A course on storytelling has given Angela Craig and her team the confidence to bring stories to life. By Hannah Crown
Telling stories is an artform that has traditionally passed from generation to generation. But is the enjoyment of relating a tale something we tend to forget in the bustle of everyday life?
For manager Angela Craig, the course Caught or Taught? from Corner To Learn has revolutionised storytelling in her setting.
She says, ‘When you hear a practitioner read a story to a child, they say things like “sit down” “come here”, “stop talking to your friends”. But if you make the story fun and involve the children in it, they have a completely different experience. It’s having the courage to engage with the children.’
Ms Craig invited former primary school head teacher Neil Griffiths to her setting, Little Rascals Pre-School in Clacton, Essex, with 75 early years practitioners from the area, to hear about how to develop a reading culture and promote storytime at home.
She says, ‘We now make the books more exciting – when we go on a bear hunt, we aren’t just reading the book – practitioners move around, use puppets and get children to make the sounds. If you know the story really well you can do things like ask the children to peep at the next page and tell you if there is a bear there.
‘Or we enact the whole thing in the garden. Whereas a story could take two minutes to read, now it can take half an hour. At the end they are screaming for you to read it again.’
The course includes personal anecdotes from trainer Mr Griffiths about his love of storytelling, and showing how adults can model the pleasure of reading.
Ms Craig says, ‘When Neil was young, he said his father was his biggest inspiration and he could make the gas bill exciting from the way he read it.’
She adds that one suggestion was to search online for facts about an element of a story. ‘He found details of the longest mouse’s tail ever recorded and he made it from a piece of string to show the children.’
The setting plans to have a pirate themed day when they read Pirates Love Underpants, with games including a treasure hunt and a pirate tea with coin biscuits.
