how we help teachers?
oncerning the use of The Storyspinner in the classroom, I have been trying to establish our position vis a vis writing. I have been telling teachers about the formula and they have been very enthusiastic.
The formula; You cannot have successful writing without speaking and listening; you cannot have successful speaking and listening without image-making.
We are fundamental to writing because we are at the very beginning of this process. We are directly involved in image-making.
When children are gathered around a whiteboard and the story begins, due to the way we have filmed it without distractions and in one take, something wonderful happens. After between 60 and 90 seconds the children stop watching the storyteller and begin to see the story. Their own imaginations begin to create their own unique version of the story. If I mention a wood, the boy from Somalia sees a completely different wood to the girl from Vietnam. Everybody in the room sees a different wood. It all depends on their life experience and their cultural references. Throughout the story the children's imaginations have created unique versions of the characters and backgrounds and even different readings of the plot. By the end of the tale there have been not one but thirty different stories told.
‘. . . and that is the end of the story.' There is now a cacophony of voices from the carpet. The children are now vocalising the story. They are retelling it. Sometimes describing their best bits or just commenting on the experience. There is not a lot of listening going on. Often two children face each other and speak simultaneously. But this is not about listening. This is about processing and exploring the images they have made. The story is still fresh and live for them. The story is still continuing. It remains in the room.
I encourage teachers to savour these moments and not intervene. They must stay quietly watching. These are precious moments where the images are still being processed. After about two minutes the teacher brings the children to a central focus. I say two minutes because a confident speaker or dominant classroom personality may impose his or her own visual images onto the group. The teacher's task is to keep each child's unique imaging vision intact.
Now begins the exploration of those images. I ask that teachers refrain from soliciting generalisations and opinions about the quality of the story - did you enjoy that? wasn't it great when..? The task is to begin a communal retelling. An exploration of the different images perceived by each individual. One way to achieve this is the five questions.
There are 3 sets of 5 questions each. Each set has a different function. The Fact Questions, The Fiction Questions and The Sensory Questions.
The Fact Questions.
These questions are there to re-establish the narrative of the story. In doing this they also recall the image for each child. They must be very general and basic of the 'who' 'what' 'where' variety. No description. So for say Little Red Riding Hood they would be;
Who sent the child into the wood with a basket of food?
Who did the child meet in the wood?
Why was the child bringing food into the wood?
What did the wolf put on before jumping into bed?
Where was granny when Red Riding Hood knocked at her door?
These do not have to be in narrative order. With older children it might be challenging to skip back and forth through the story along the narrative line. These questions are to establish the facts of the story. That which gives it its basic structure.
The Fiction Questions.
Now we come to the differences in each child's perception of the story. These answers do not come from the story that has been told, they come from what each child 'saw' when watching the story. The teacher should explain that each answer is truthful because it comes from the child's imagination.
What kind of basket was it?
What colour is the wolf?
Did you see any other animals in the wood?
Does the woodcutter live in the wood?
How would you describe the nightdress that the wolf is wearing?
Do not gainsay any of the answers to promote reality. If the basket is a Morrison’s' shopping trolley, well perhaps that is what the child saw. We must never assume that our children might know what a basket is. In many ways their world is very different to the one we experienced at that age. By the same token, if one child saw a dinosaur in the wood we have to take that at face value, perhaps acknowledging that their wood is certainly a very dangerous place in that child's imagining. The other children will have their own opinion on this matter. But again all the 'pictures' seen by a child are valid at this stage.
The Sensory Questions.
Now we communally build up the detail of the story entirely from the imaginations of the group. Choose one scene in the story to explore. Repeat the question after every answer until you can judge it right to go on to the next question.
Granny's cottage. Open the door. Stand in the entrance. Look inside.
What do you see?
The bed. Where? Over there. (points left)
The cupboard. Where? Over there. (points right).
There is a glass with teeth in. By the bed.
There are shoes by the door etc.
What do you smell?
Food cooking. What kind of food?
Flowers. On the table.
Soap. Cleaning liquid.
Wet clothes from the wash.
The wolf's fur etc.
What do you hear?
Snoring.
Clock ticking.
Silence.
The bird's outside etc.
What do you feel?
The doorframe is rough wood. Splinters.
Cold inside the cottage.
The carpet is soft.
Spiders webs etc.
What do you taste?
This depends on the particular scene that is chosen. However many children smell with their tongues and it may be worth giving it a try to see what responses can be had!
All of the above is the first lesson with The Story Spinner. Many teachers have used only one set of five questions per lesson. Some have used all fifteen questions in one lesson and then repeated the same lesson the next day with the same story. These have told me the results are remarkable and that the detail that the children have managed to build up over these lessons has gone beyond the original story.
This is just the jumping off point to writing. But we still have not picked up a pencil because there is still so much more to do in the oral field.
- At St Johns the year 1 class immediately got up and 'played' the story unsupervised.
- At Tufnell Park the year 3 teacher had been reading Theseus in two different versions, but it was only when the children 'saw' it on the whiteboard that it liberated and excited them enough for them to beg to start writing.
- At Kentish Town a year 4 boy recited the entire story immediately after watching it with pauses for effect, different voices and re-imagining some of the scenes. Previously it had been hard for him to write a word but from that lesson his writing leapt forward.
- A year 5 class having seen Palmer and the Mermaid have created an undersea world in the classroom and are basing their literacy, science and DT on that story.
- At St Michaels they are using a lot of drama work in the classroom with hot seating, character study, re-telling the story backwards, from different points of view, adding prologues and epilogues and generally ripping the story apart.
- I walked past a year 6 class in Hoxton and was delighted to find them using a year 2 story to compliment Pie Corbett's work. They felt that because the children had 'seen' the story in their imagination it was so much easier to investigate with his method than having it read to them.
The fact is that because The Story Spinner is such a flexible resource teachers have been feeding back to me many different and varied uses they have made of it. Each classroom in the land is different and only the teacher will know what will work for them and their children. Teachers with a high number of EAL children say that the cadences used and the wealth of language along with repeated viewings, often individually on the laptop, have had remarkable results. At Heathfield primary up in Darlington when the year 2's had seen Red Riding Hood, they immediately ran into the nearby wood to re live the story.
The point is image-making is an essential part of writing. Pencils must not be picked up until the imagination is thoroughly exercised. Image-making subsists within children and the promotion of the idea that every child will see a different image and that all the images are valid, will lead to richer and more complex writing.
Besides the fact that telling a story to a child, and having a whole library of stories at your disposal to do that, is a very dear gift indeed.