Reading Well(s)

Assigned reading This week we had to read nonfiction. My favorite genre as a school librarian is nonfiction picture books. I love using them with 3rd grade and above, even with high schoolers. They are such a wonderful introduction to a topic that kids often do not know about. I need to book talk and share these to get them into the kids hands because they can get overlooked. Considering nonfiction picture books from a storytelling perspective, changes their usefulness a bit.  The books I read this week are on the left. I could envision using the picture book biographies for storytelling without the book and then showing some of the pictures afterward as Green and Del Negro suggest in our text (2010). Other books like How to Swallow a Pig won't work for storytelling without a book, would even be hard for a read aloud due to the broken up text. In this book the info is divided into short 2-3 sentence paragraphs with images scattered across the page. Kids love these kinds of informa...

 As I've explored blogs on storytelling, I am amazed at how many of them are nonprofits with storytelling workshops. They are localized, not international. Consider the Young Storyteller 's group in CA. It looks like a super successful program that is mentor based. Or Patchwork: A Storytelling Guild based in PA, that seeks to promote the oral telling of stories. At first, I was confused by the locality of these sites, why not serve the whole country? Then I remembered that storytelling promotes community. Web of who appears to recognize the value of storyte lling  I also noticed that the organizations that did offer storyteller workshops often had testimonies from participates. Participates range from big name companies like Google or Nike to pastors, non-profits, and insurance sales teams. I kept wondering, why, until this class, has storytelling never been taught to me? As a high school English teacher, I would think storytelling would be taught. Why are businesses and no...

Students as Storytellers: Let's begin with a bit of background. My only experience with a storyteller who told stories orally, without a book, was with my grandmother. When we visited, each night should would put me to bed with a story. She told stories of my dad and his siblings growing up. I loved bedtime at grandma's house.  t I still remember some of them: my uncle wearing his rain boots into deep mud and getting stuck-for hours, my dad setting the curtains on fire. I remember her as a wonderful storyteller. It gave me an appreciation not just for storytelling but of the way stories can connect us to our history.  Second bit of background, I homeschooled my daughters for seven years. We used a curriculum that followed history. So art, history, literature, music history, some science etc. all radiated from a certain time period. It was cool and exhausting as a teacher/parent. For three of those years, we were in a co-op. At each meeting, three kids had to present a researc...