School Programs:
Performance
World Fables & Faery Tales
Once upon a time wishing worked, they paved streets with Gold, and folks too poor to even afford a look lived happily ever. Participatory storytelling opens children's imaginations to discover our world's unity and diversity. Eighty tales from around the world available for performance!
Goals
This program introduces children to the oral traditions, universal themes, and heroic quests of our world's folk and faery tales. The storytelling experience opens children's imaginations to the rewards of reading, writing and creative thinking.
Objectives
The children will learn, during a forty five minute participatory performance, how varied cultures solve the same timeless troubles. Students learn actively listen, follow a plot, understand characters, and discuss their reactions to a tale. They acquire basic pre-writing skills on a sensory, verbal and vicarious level. The stories will provide a catalyst for a whole language exploration of literature, writing, history, geography, science, and personal insight.
Activities.
Activity Idea Sheets, suggesting story making games, ways to role play, creative writing and related readings will be provided. Ask too about stories to bring out your themes, and make your curricular goals.
A morning assembly opens the day, followed by in class workshops. The performance begins with a simple word game to spark student interest. Varied voices, movements, sound effects, short songs, and audience participation weave children into the story's spell. We do imaginative stretches in between each tale.
- Performances and workshops for Pre-K and Kindergartens are generally 35 minutes.
- Performances and workshops for first through fourth grades are 50 minutes.
Workshops
A thirty to forty-five minute workshop builds various skills.
- We discuss the children's favorite parts from the stories heard.
- Some events, characters, and sounds are recreated.
- An imaginative journey uses each sense to reveal plot, vocabulary and setting in a story.
- Younger children draw new endings, or solve a problem presented in a told tale.
- The children are encouraged to write down any words they can to describe their pictures.
- We may reenact a tale leading to a production of Beginning - Middle - End books.
Older students compare the told tales with stories from other lands, and establish a brainstorm list of each tale's unique cultural elements. The workshop initiates creative writing. New endings, other adventures and original stories are drafted.
Performance Possiblilities
- Audrey and the Wolf - This story, adapted from the South offers children a song and a way to transform bad to good in a moving, flower-filled Red Riding Hood adventure.
- Barkface and Rootnose - An original fable of friendship prevailing over fighting, the telling features finger plays, chants, thunder and skunky socks!
- Lucky John - Adapted from the Brother's Grimm, guides children through steps from gold to love. Ideal too for plot sequencing and story maps.
- The Rainbow Pony - Comes from Spain and South America to prove brains and brawn don't always make a hero. There's silly songs, and humor too!
- A Story, A Story - Adapted from West Africa's vast tradition of Anansi tales, this version has our spidery man earning back all the stories in the world. It's clever and fun.
75 other possible performance tales await your students, including;
- Three Billy Goats Gruff, a finger play
- Rapunzel & Rumplestiltskin
- East of the Sun West of the Moon
- James Thurber's Many Moons
Also, Aesop and other African Indian and Native American animal fables. Ask about The Boy Who Wouldn't Bathe, Sibling Stories and DINOSAURS.