Monthly news - Are you sitting comfortably?
Settle down for National Storytelling Week, which runs from 27 January until February 3 this year. Events are taking place in museums, libraries, schools, theatres, bookshops, storytelling clubs, retirement homes and pubs to encourage people to get involved in this ancient oral tradition. Leicester-based storyteller, Chris Corps, told us how he plans to bring storytelling to life in the classroom.
The tradition of storytelling is currently enjoying a revival with a new BBC series of Jackanory for children back on air and the Barbican’s storytelling programme pulling in packed audiences at each performance.
Chris believes the appeal of storytelling for adults and children alike lies in the spoken stories' power to capture people’s attention immediately. “There’s something about the nature of the language in a told story which creates a connection with the listener,” he says.
Chris will be visiting Chenderit School near Banbury as part of National Storytelling Week, to carry out a series of storytelling workshops with Year 7 pupils. “We’ll concentrate on two things,” he says. “First, generating stories, then we’ll look at ways of learning one of the stories I told them in the morning so that they can retell it themselves.”
The storytelling day at Chenderit School forms part of the year-long Excel to Tell programme that the secondary school is involved in, along with ten primary schools. The programme culminates in July with a storytelling ‘extravaganza’. “We’ll have lots of storytelling tents where children can hear pupils from other schools telling different stories,” explains Martin Barber, an advanced skills teacher (AST) at Chenderit School.
Children’s ability to remember stories they’ve been told never ceases to surprise Chris. “Before Christmas, I returned to a school in Leicester where I had run some storytelling workshops earlier in the year, and I was amazed at the ability of these eight-year-olds to recall practically every story we’d shared over the previous 15 months!” he laughs.
www.sfs.org.uk
