Stories Alive! a thunderstorm of chopsticks

Stories Alive!

twilight music 

18th Jan 2016

it's quite hard to catch stamping feet....

Ben wrestles sticky tape

We began with noise…

This was a twilight session for teaching staff from the 5 nursery schools of the Stories Alive! Project. As the project draws to a close, we have been looking at areas we would like to develop more – not necessarily as a project but perhaps within individual nurseries. Our musician/storyteller, Ben McCabe had done an excellent job of inspiring both children and  staff musically during earlier workshops, giving all of us new confidence  in ourselves as musical people, so we gathered for an afterschool session with him.

We began with noise….

Over 2015, Stories Alive! placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire. Our teams have been challenged to develop sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are all working with. There have been storyhouses built, storysacks made, stories mapped, little adventures, big adventures, whole storyworlds of adventure. Because of the carefulness of photographs of young children, I’ve charted relatively little of the project so far but will hopefully catch up a bit now….

So we began with noise….

chair drummers, poised

We sang a journey: improvising an adventure with repeating sounds, actions and words, reflecting on the value of combining sound and movement. We played musical I-spy, creating improbable stories with improvised lines

It wasn’t all just fun, you know. We talked about the importance of playing with sounds for developing verbal skills. We thought about rhythm, story structure, dance and the abstract thought processes that represent action or objects with sounds and the value of recording patterns of sound - creating group scores as a way of thinking about writing. And we made a spectacular amount of noise with sets of cooking chopsticks (other wooden rods are available) on the backs of chairs (other furniture is also available)

ready for action

And that was fun. The rest of the evening was fun, too, but this was spectacular. A rippling seashore of noise breaking over the chairs: rattles and scrapes and thumps and scratches and 50 people laughing and concentrating and releasing a thunderstorm in a school hall

This has been a good project. This is still proving to be a good project!

Nursery schools involved

Taywood 

Newtown

Rockwood

Basnett Street

Rosegrove 

thunder

Stories Alive! is supported by Grants for the Arts 

and the Stocks Massey Bequest

Stories Alive!: developing techniques

The Short Story Lady at Basnett Street Nursery

A report from Carol on a workshop day
"This time I took the key workers out of the classroom to work on storytelling techniques. I observed each of them telling their favourite stories to their key groups. I noticed that while everyone had particular skills, the way to bring out the best in everyone would involve sharing the best of these skills across the group. I took notes about each key worker’s strengths and areas for development, and assigned them each one person to help them with a particular skill, and one person they should help in turn. I made a story sack for the book “Someone Bigger” by Jonathan Emmett and Adrian Reynolds, and used this story sack to demonstrate how they can best be used to enhance all areas of the curriculum. I asked the key workers to begin thinking about making their own story sacks in anticipation of the INSET day I’m delivering in late May."

Carol Ferro is the Short Story Lady, one of the artists working on the Stories alive! project

Photos:  due to the nature of this activity we haven't 

got any photos, so here are a couple of 

cheerful Spring pictures to liven your eyes!

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5 different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with

Stories Alive! A tree of stories

Through the forest:

a Stories alive! day at Basnett St Nursery

with Carol Ferro

sunlight shines through story-leaves

a report from the Short Story Lady

"I have been chosen to work with four other artists on the Stories Alive! project, which runs across five nursery schools in Burnley through 2015. The project aims to bring together children, parents, nursery staff and the wider community, to raise literacy attainment through storytelling.

a forest full of creatures (resting)

Each nursery was allocated a dedicated artist to work with them throughout the school year, with several artist visits and training days. I am working with Basnett Street Nursery School.

leaves from a story-tree

The children were introduced to the project through a visit to Burnley Youth Theatre, where they met several of the project’s artists and enjoyed a walk through their imaginations, going “into the woods” and making their own stories with their key workers.

The stories were written on paper leaves to stick on “Story trees” to display at nursery (pictured below)

I visited the nursery for a “Gruffalo Day”, and took the children on a sensory adventure around the story. They walked round the forest area while listening to the story, made playdough models of the story characters, tasted Gruffalo foods (Scrambled “snake”, “Gruffalo” crumble etc), and helped me tell the story using puppets. We looked at a storyboard to help the children understand the order events happen in the story. We had a wonderful day, and the staff and children learned a lot."

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below) in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5 different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with