Creative Teaching for Today's Young People

Creative Teaching

Listening: Participatory Storytelling

Moving right along. Or rather, backing up a bit to spend a little more time with listening skills before I strike out in new areas of creative planning.

To recap my previous emphasis on the development of active listening skills, especially with young media-distracted children, it has been said that listening is the other half of talking. To encourage active listening, strategies must be used in which students listen to increasingly difficult material, to think, to remember, and to respond. Effective listening is the ability to concentrate on, organize, and interpret what is heard. And last of all, learners should listen because they want to.

Developing children's listening skills is woven in and out of our daily interaction with them. However, when we want to give it center stage, I have found that participatory storytelling is most effective. It is teaching listening itself. And it is so much fun.

When youngsters have a role in the telling of a tale, the story directly relates to them personally, and they want to listen.

When they have a part to play, they have a reason to listen.

When the tale is also both and funny to tell, the humor appeals to youngsters' desire to "get a joke."

When they find out they are going to entertain others with their performance, they listen more intently.

And once they know that the pattern of the story demands that they pay close attention, they simply do not want to miss a cue!

For participatory storytelling, you need to find a folktale or story in which a few parts of the text can be changed into refrains for recitation by the children. This will be a patterned, repetitious routine, familiar in the oral tradition, and is usually humorous or is sometimes admonishment.

Several years ago, I had a grant to experiment with this type of storytelling and adapted about ten stories for this purpose. My most successful attempt was Wanda Gág's "Gone Is Gone: Or The Story Of A Man Who Wanted To Do Housework" (2003 edition, University of Minnesota Press), which I received permission to reprint for my OxCart Productions DVD of "Wanda Gág: A Minnesota Childhood".

I highly recommend getting a copy of the wee book itself to enjoy Gág's delightful Old World illustrations, and of course I'd love to send you the "Minnesota Childhood" DVD with my script attached, if you want to order it.

My examples here will be from that storytelling project.

With the very young, I found I was the one doing the telling. As primary narrator, I needed a script to read aloud and would suggest you do the same. It can be bound perhaps as a booklet to make it an easier prop.

In the script you should highlight visual cues that you will use to indicate silently to the children when it is time for them to recite their parts. For instance, my index finger held up signaled the children's shouted response, "But Hulla!", and my hand on my cheek called for their wail of despair, "Hey, hi, ho hulla! Na, na, na!"

The script also should have verbal cues, which will be emphasized by you in a rather loud voice, at least during initial rehearsals. For instance, in our performance, my repetition of the phrase "and this is what she said" signaled the children to recite in unison:

"I clean the house,
Cook the soup,
Churn the butter,
Care for the baby
And all the animals in the yard,
Working hard
From day to day."

These lines were right out of the book, but I just put them together as a refrain to be repeated a few times. I used simple drawings at first (a broom, soup kettle, butter churn, baby, farm animal) for cued recall during initial rehearsals. This created a bridge for children from stories with pictures to the oral tradition (which in its purest form does not rely on pictures at all).

After the refrain was memorized, hand motions replaced the drawings as children began to remember the sequence of events. These were simple and obvious visual elaborations of the actions described (rocking a baby back and forth in your arms, etc.) and were for the children themselves to do as they recited.

Use your imagination for cues and motions that are appropriate for your story and for your storytellers. Use the children's own suggestions, which enhances their retention. When developmentally appropriate, memorization may progress with practice to pure recall and pure storytelling, meaning visual cues and actions are no longer used.

For a performance, everyone is seated. Participatory storytellers sit on the floor, facing the narrator. If there's room in a classroom, auditorium or gym, both narrator and children can be angled so that they partially face the audience (but still can see each other).

The presentation should be informal and cozy, like storytellers of old sitting around the fire.

Most of all, have fun!

Flotsam, The Silver Pony

Flotsam, The Silver Pony and Debris of Several Kinds

I'm guessing for bloggers that one of the good things about the craft is that it can be picked up and set down at will. Which is what I've done by neglecting to write lately. Life has a way of interrupting one pursuit with another. It's a good thing, to have too much to do with family, travel, other writing, and just plain horsing around. Wouldn't want it any other way.

Now a couple of things have come across my desk -- the 2007 Caldecott Award winner and a New York Times article (February 6, 2007, Science Times ) -- that make the need to post on this blog rise to the top of the To Do List again.

I know for a fact that the best thing about my topic of creative planning for teaching is that it is so fluid. I ended my first series of posts, which was about getting kids today to listen and pay attention, and I was all ready to branch off into another series that might interest teachers -- integrating the curriculum in our multi-media world.

And then along come the Caldecott announcement and the Times piece by William J. Broad and I'm off and running, slightly off track but full steam ahead nonetheless. This is a case of the Gots To Do.

The interdisciplinary nature of some picture books for children is well-documented and much-loved. I've been writing about this for years, and if any of my books were still in print (heavy sigh), I'd refer you to the sections that discuss my intense pleasure at using such books with students. Alas, I'll have to re-cap some of what I've written for you, but not right now.

I don't get as much joy going over my previous work as I do in plunging into what's currently exciting me -- the work of David Weisner, Lynd Ward, and space experts. So they go first.

Flotsam is David Weisner's latest Caldecott Award winner for best 2006 American picture book. It is wordless, and we owe so much to Weisner for giving us such other grand wordless books over the years -- Tuesday (1992 Caldecott winner), Free Fall (1989 Caldecott Honor Book), Sector 7 (2000 Caldecott Honor Book), as well as the fun words in The Three Pigs (2002 Caldecott winner). Also look at his wordless Hurricane and June 29, 1999.

In Flotsam, the tide offers a boy on the beach some intriguing debris -- an old underwater camera -- and the developed pictures are not only of fantasy creatures of the deep but also of a girl holding a photo of a boy holding a photo of another child who is holding a photo of another...and so on, each photo seen through the boy's magnifying glass, giving him glimpses into the past in other parts of the world.

Weisner was born too late to have as much firsthand knowledge as I do of the picture-within-a-picture visual gimmick so popular in children's magazines during my own 1940's childhood. I used to collect these pictures and still have today one of my favorites: on the cover of a December Progressive Farmer magazine, Santa is in his bubblebath reading the same Progressive Farmer that has Santa on the cover in his bubblebath, and so on. Weisner's photo is also different in Flotsam, in that each child pictured holds a photo of another child. But you get where my nostalgia came from the first time I looked at the book.

A tiny disappointment in Flotsam is that the fantastic photos of life beneath the sea -- where there are mermaids, street lamps, and even a dog's collar on a fish -- are lost on the out-going tide (but maybe the creatures below find a way to snap some more? Yes, they must surely have taken the other ones!).

The ending is perfect, however, as another child in another place finds the camera as flotsam on her beach, and in the developed film will be the picture the boy took of himself holding the photo he had found. Interdisciplinary studies are abundant in this little book -- marine biology, visual literacy, language arts, history, geography.

Rewind for a look at a wordless book over 30 years back to The Silver Pony: a Story in Pictures by Lynd Ward (Houghton, 1973), selected by the New York Times Book Review section as one of the Best Illustrated Books of that year. Go online to get yourself a copy. (Ward also won the Caldecott Award, for The Biggest Bear in 1953.)

The Silver Pony is a thick, black-and-white "chapter book" without words and at first glance, you might well say No Way for today's children. Believe me, you will be wrong. After a brief synopsis of plot and book design, I will enumerate all the ways I found to expand on the enjoyment of this book with children in kindergarten through second grade --sometimes taking several sessions -- for over twenty years in the classroom.

In The Silver Pony, a lonely farm boy is visited by a flying horse that takes him on magical night-time journeys. The first is North, where the boy drops an apple to an Eskimo child; South to help an African-American boy with a rowboat save a stranded family on a rooftop during a flood (shades of New Orleans during Katrina); West where the boy and his pony rescue a young Native American shepherd's lamb from the jaws of a mountain lion; and East to deliver sunflowers, first to a Puerto Rican girl on a rooftop in the Big City and another for a girl at a lighthouse overlooking the Atlantic.

The only direction left is to fly up, but there the boy and his faithful steed get smacked by a rocket, are sent plummeting to earth, and sadly only the boy survives. His parents present him with a pony, and he is seen riding off, we assume for other, real-life, adventures.

The book design is simple, each illustration facing a blank page. An accumulation of stars signify the change in chapters -- one star, two, three, up to eight if my memory serves.  This design itself is where children begin. They are warned that for this big, fat book they are the ones who will tell the story, not you, for there are only three words -- The Silver Pony -- and showing all those blank pages assures them this is truly a book they could "read".

After one star for Chapter One, you begin lessons in Visual Literacy by asking them, What do you see? What is it called? What does it do? And thus begins a visual inventory of all the youngsters can find to point out on each page. Stressing the "What, Who, When and Where" questions gives childen -- especially city children -- the opportunity to learn and name all the details in the pictures that tell them that this is a farm early in the morning. This inventory is important to take time for, to give the very young child practice in order to be able later to analyze and interpret -- the "How and Why" questions -- other events later in the story.

Because very soon the boy -- who the children say "looks sad", the beginning of interpretation, which is great since they are starting to get into what Ward is doing with his story -- is going to get whupped, and this is also important to take time for. For goodness sake, in today's world a spanking means so much more to us than it did to Ward thirty years ago, when we had not analyzed all that such discipline might do to children.

In The Silver Pony, the boy is turned over his father's knee and flat out gets a whipping, and some entire classrooms full of children I have known fall absolutely silent at this, either out of disbelief or out of empathy, bless their hearts (maybe having experienced some such themselves). You can not continue The Silver Pony without first analyzing why it is the boy is being punished, and it gives an adult an excellent time to help children examine in pictures the motivation for actions that often occur in real life. Is this case, the boy endangered himself by running in front of the father's tractor, plus dad had to stop work for nothing (assuming the boy lied.....).

Isn't that what visual literacy can be about? Applying what we see in pictures to help us understand our own lives?

This unhappy episode early on also sets the stage for the fact that this book will not be all sweetness and light. Hard times lay ahead.

I will not deconstruct all of The Silver Pony is this way; it would be far too tedious. I leave it up to you to find the book and begin your own interpretations. But I hope you see that within the first few pages, this book can reach today's kids with an impact few other books have.

I will however give a shorthand review of all I found delightfully interdisciplinary about the book as I used it with children through the '70's, '80's and '90's:

(1) Language Arts: Introduce younger children to chapter books, in which a change in chapters is defined as a change in Time or Place or Both. Can they distinguish which it is for each chapter? And what parts of the story might be left out between some of the changes?

(2) Weather Science: Review the cardinal directions through Ward's use of a weather vane on top of the barn. (City kids may at first call it a windmill or a pinwheel....) Weather vanes can be fascinating works of art. Buy a simple one and mount it for kids to work with. Make simple ones with straws, straight pins and paper.

(3) Geography: Study a map of North America to imagine where the pony is taking the boy each time. Study about those places. Learn about the people who live there. Why would apples and sunflowers be such surprises for children in some parts of this hemisphere? What other kinds of things might be fun to take? Does the boy himself live in the Midwest?

(4) Literature: Broaden a search for other stories about flying horses, a recurring motif in literature around the world down through the ages. You have only to start with Pegasus, and for that many children have already seen the Hollywood animated movie.

(5) Last of all the areas to study -- Space Technology -- is introduced by the terrible scene in The Silver Pony in which the boy and pony have flown into outer space, only to be sent falling to earth again. The silence in the classroom can indeed be deafening when this page is turned. All the practice given to the children in inventorying and analyzing what they have seen in the book until now comes into play, usually with positive results for their interpretation of events, however disquieting.

It seems that in 1973 Ward envisioned the possibility of space debris in a nuclear age, a veritable junkyard of whirling debris either cast off by space craft or left over from explosions and destructive tests. Bits of orbiting, cast-off technology, he was saying in his pictures, would begin to dangerously crowd outer space.

Enter now -- February 2007 -- The New York Times Science News article with its headline, "Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat". (An Internet search for "space debris" offers all the background needed to explore this topic if the article itself can no longer be accessed.) According to the article, not only is the threat of colliding debris a reality in space, but it is also predicted that such a collision will "start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens."

Reading further, one learns that such cascade warnings began as early as 1978 (Ward must've surely felt vindicated), but Washington and Moscow generally ignored the danger, so the number of objects grew as more nations launched rockets and satellites into orbit. By now, two-thirds of the 3000 spacecraft orbiting Earth are no longer active, and nearly 7000 pieces of man-made debris are large enough to be tracked.

Flotsam indeed.

Never fear that children will have bad dreams after this part of The Silver Pony. The resilience of childhood is truly remarkable, as study after psychological study has assuredly shown. Bringing kids the bad news about our space junkyards -- if only in a wordless picture book backed up by newspaper accounts -- succeeds only in firing most of them up to get out shovels and the dustpan. Time and again, the ending of The Silvery Pony to youngsters is still uplifting, because the boy gets a real pony and has the first truly big smile to be seen in the whole book. So it is. They view the calamity as solveable. In a child's world, so it is and so it goes. Every silver lining's got a pony in it. This book ends for them as satisfying as does Weisner's Flotsam.

For our adult edification, experts say that a solution to the cascade threat in space may exist, but it will be costly. Existing large objects might be removed from orbit. Lasers might be used to zap debris. Engines might be installed to send dead spacecraft back into the atmosphere. 

And it could be that some youngster sitting there quietly for the ending to The Silver Pony will be the one who grows up to figure it out.