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Getting Started
Kids tell stories all the time to adults and to each other, but very few have stood in front of a group and told a prepared story. Assuming you have a group of interested kids (see the Publicity section of this site for ideas on how to generate interest), you now have the task of getting them ready to tell their first story. The following are some basic steps and ideas to get things going.
These guidelines are very basic, and there are many more activities that a storytelling club can do to prepare to tell stories. Consider consulting the Resources page for further ideas.
Step 1: Model a Storytelling | Step 2: Story Selection
Step 3: Preparing to Tell the Story | Step 4: Telling the Story to an Audience
Step 1: Model a Storytelling. At your first meeting or session start off by telling a story to the kids. (If you need some tips on how to tell, check out Barry McWilliams’ “Effective Storytelling: A Manual for Beginners”.) Then discuss the telling with the kids: what you did to learn the story, how you practiced, how it felt to tell it. Let them talk about what they liked most or didn’t like.
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Step 2: Story Selection. Here are some tips for making the story selection process smooth:
- Have plenty of age-appropriate, simple stories on hand for kids to choose from. See the Resources section for some options.
- Emphasize that the children should choose a story they really like, that their audience will like, and that they will feel comfortable telling multiple times.
- Devote one entire session to this step, and allow children to check out story collections if they need more time.
- Older children might want to tell a family story or a story of their own creation. Encourage them to write out the story, reading what they’ve written out loud as they go along.
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Step 3: Preparing to Tell the Story. This step will take multiple sessions. In preparing to tell, children should do the following:
- Read the story out loud several times.
- Learn the sequence of events. What happens in the beginning, the middle, and the end?
- Learn the bones of the story. The bones are the key points of the story—the things that must be included in the telling.
- Create a storyboard. Kids sketch out the story on index cards as they would like to tell it—stick figures are fine. They can start to learn the story by scrambling the cards and putting them back in order.
- Create pictures in memory. What do the events, characters, and places in the story look like? By practicing visualizing the story, kids have a fuller sense of it and can remember it better.
- Read the story out loud again.
- Tell your story to yourself over and over and over again. Have you made the story your own? Help kids understand that their version of the story won’t be exactly like the printed one. The idea is not to memorize, but to tell a new version that only they can tell. The more they practice, the more this new version will become comfortable, familiar and automatic.
- Practice the story in pairs or small groups. This gives kids a chance to practice telling to an audience, but without the pressure of a larger audience.
- Prepare an introduction the story. The introduction should tell where the child heard or read the story. Beyond that, the child can choose what else to say. It should be brief, however.
During this preparation time, you can also do various activities with the kids that don’t relate directly to learning their specific stories, but that will help them with the performance aspect of storytelling. The following are a few examples:
- For learning to speak with expression, have children count to ten in various different tones of voice, such as the tone an angry parent would use in saying, “I’m going to count to ten, and if you haven’t picked up those clothes. . .” or the tone a small child learning to count would use.
- For learning facial expressions, have children demonstrate emotions on their faces while the other kids try to guess what the emotion is.
- For learning body language, have kids pretend they are walking in various situations, such as through snow, with a cast on one foot, through a graveyard, etc.
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Step 4: Telling the Story to an Audience. The following are tips that you can give the children for making the performance more relaxing and enjoyable.
- Memorize the first and last lines of the story. This will help kids feel less nervous, because at least they know how to start and end the story.
- If you freeze, relax and take a deep breath. The pause feels longer to you than it does to the audience. If you can’t think of what comes next, repeat the last line, and it will probably come.
- Don’t apologize for mistakes. If you mess up, just keep going. If you missed an important point, you can say something like, “You should also know that. . .”
- Look the audience in the eyes. Eye contact with the audience will help both you and them feel more comfortable.
- Pace yourself. Speak clearly and try not to rush.
- Let your audience hear how much you like this story as you tell it. The more the teller enjoys the telling, the more fun it is for the audience.
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Many of these guidelines are adapted from the website for the Clow Elementary School Student Storytellers and from Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weiss’ book Children Tell Stories: A Teaching Guide. (Richard C. Owen Publishers, Inc., 1990.)
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