“Storytelling can be found enriching lives everywhere. The sharing between teller and listener empowers, feeding the imagination from one generation to the next.”- Society for Storytelling.
The Society for Storytelling is hosting its annual National Storytelling Week from 29th Jan~ 5th February. Supporting & promoting Storytelling in the UK. Oral storytelling is one of the most ancient art forms and continues to this day as a vibrant part of culture throughout the world. The Society for Storytelling have loads of helpful resources that will give you guidance on many aspects of Storytelling.
Storytelling has been shown by studies to aid learning in children for history, increase interest in science and have a positive effect on memory. When the students do the storytelling, it can encourage higher-level thinking skills, such as analysis and synthesis, as well as skills in oral composition.
National Storytelling Week is celebrated for a full week in February and takes place in all sorts of places, including schools, hospitals and care homes. Stories are chosen and are told in a magical way between the teller and the listener. It’s a fantastic way for people to share their own stories, or even invent something entirely new.
Here are the Inspire team’s top tips and recommendations on how to use LGfL’ range of teaching and learning resources to support you and your students during National Storytelling Week.
The Whole Story resource features a professional storyteller offering his advice to teachers on how to incorporate storytelling across the curriculum using images, objects and structure. This resource aims to explore how storytelling can maximise the creativity within learning activities for your students by capturing the expert advice of a professional storyteller and arranging this advice into a simple interface.
Students can also get advice on how to create their stories by well-known authors in ReadingZone Live. ReadingZone Live is a development of the existing partnership between LGfL and Readingzone and brings regular interviews and live video calls with some of the best contemporary children’s authors to schools nationwide.
Antony Horowitz, Henry Winkler, Sophie McKenzie, Michael Morpurgo, Oliver Jeffers, Sally Nichols and Lauren Child are among the authors who have already joined us for ReadingZone Live, which is helping inspire young people to explore new authors and genres and to develop their own creative story creating.
Don't forget that our ReadingZone libeBookclub are back! Join the ReadingZone Bookclub programme of free virtual author events each term. The book club is aimed at classrooms and libraries that are keen to develop a love of reading. Events for ages 5-11 years. This Autumn, authors including Catherine Johnson, Alistair Chisholm and Vashti Hardy have joined our programme of free virtual author events. All these events are open to all schools and classrooms to join in, and are free to join! Meeting an author can have a real impact on children's Reading for Pleasure - plus our Friday afternoon virtual book club events are a great way to end the week! To sign up for any of these free events, and for more details, email info@readingzone.com
ReadingZone Bookclub Author Events this Spring:
Animals and the Environment with Gill Lewis (David Fickling Books)
Friday 11th February, 2pm - 2.45pm
For Years 5&6 (ages 9+)
Join Gill Lewis, the award-winning author of Sky Hawk, Gorilla Dawn and Moon Bear, and find out what inspires her stories about animals and the environments in which they live. In this session, Gill will talk about the inspiration behind her books and introduce readers to the amazing cast of canines dealing with life's ups and downs in her new story A Street Dog Named Pup.
Fantastically Great Women with Kate Pankhurst (Bloomsbury Children's Books)
Friday 25th February, 2pm - 2.45pm
For Years 2, 3 & 4 (ages 7-9)
Meet Kate Pankhurst, author and illustrator of the Fantastically Great Women picture book series, and find out about her latest book in the series, Fantastically Great Women Artists and their Stories.
Magic and Art with Rob Biddulph (Macmillan Children's Books)
Friday 11th March, 2pm - 2.45pm
For Years 3-6 (ages 8+)
Join award-winning author/illustrator Rob Biddulph to celebrate Peanut Jones and the Illustrated City, the first book in a new middle-grade series. Fizzing with magic, danger, friendship and art, this exciting and funny adventure is just what you would expect from the creative genius behind #DrawWithRob. Find out more about the book, learn about Rob's artistic journey and take part in an exclusive Peanut Jones' inspired draw along.
Writing Great Adventure Stories & Non-Fiction with Sam Sedgman (Macmillan Children's Books)
Friday 25th March, 2pm - 2.45pm
For Years 3-6 (ages 8+)
Join author Sam Sedgman, co-author of the Adventures on Trains series, and find out about his latest book, Sabotage on the Solar Express! Go behind the scenes to learn more about trains and some of the world's most exciting train journeys in Sam's new book, Epic Adventures, and learn how to research and write great non-fiction.
The wonderful Busy Things team who have released a large number of well-known book extracts and activities based on the Reading Zone Live content. Just Visit English > Reading: comprehension in your chosen setup and explore all the resources and don't forget they are a range of traditional tales resources available as well.
You could explore Space Adventures Mission to the Moon. This unique and engaging cross-curricular resource is based around an original story commissioned by LGfL by the award-winning author Cath Howe. It features dramatic content and a Virtual Reality (VR) experience linked to the narrative. The aim is to draw the learner into the turn of events that threatens the ability of our intrepid astronaut, Tazz, to return safely back to Earth. Will Mic, the onboard computer, be enough to get her back safely? Or will she need to use her maths problem-solving skills and science knowledge and understanding to get her back to safety?
Early Years practitioners or Key Stage could make use of our Fairy Tales resource and then re-tell their favourite Fairytale using the PDF images included within the resource.
Another fantastic resource to use during this week is Listening Books; these audiobooks are great to appreciate stories read aloud. There is a great range of fiction and non-fiction available to support pupils from Key Stage 2 up to A-Level, including:
Don’t forget as an LGfL subscribing school, you also have access to all the tools found in the Adobe Creative Cloud, why not use these tools to help your students tell their stories with this simple but powerful lesson example from Adobe Education Exchange.
This short resource will walk you through a quick challenge to get started with Creative Cloud Express*. Learn ways creative Cloud Express for Education can be used to help your students make their thinking visible and share their voices with the world! Creative Cloud Express for Education is a simple, powerful, presentation and storytelling tool which is perfect for the classroom. it’s quick and easy to master runs on any browser and includes a beautifully creative set of tools that will help unlock the creativity of your students.
For an even more powerful tool, why not use Adobe Audition the professional tool for precision audio editing, mixing, and sound effects. (Again part of your Let’s Get Digital Bundle) with this tool you capture, design, and mix sound with the industry's best digital audio workstation. With multitrack, waveform, and spectral frequency displays, easily record, edit, and clean up audio content, for more support with Adobe Audition go here.
When retelling and recording stories your students could make use of the BBC Sound Effects Archive – to enhance and enrich their oral stories, this large database of audio sound effects can be used within a wide range of applications in an educational context. Many sounds have multiple versions to suit different uses.
*Adobe Spark for Education is now known as Creative Cloud Express for Education. This new browser-based creativity tool brings together the Creative Cloud Express app, Photoshop Express, and Premiere Rush. You can still use your old Spark passwords and any projects you have saved will still be available. (Adobe has worked with Google to make sure that Creative Cloud Express is fully compatible with Chromebooks.)
The National Literacy Trust have a range of useful links and resources to support the event here.
BBC Teach have a collection of teaching resources for primary and secondary schools, perfect for inspiring your class with the wonder of stories during National Storytelling
Be sure to also check out World Book day’s reading recommendation lists, where they have book lists for all readers of all ages with all types of interests. For younger readers, discover their Share a Story Corner video books
The LGfL Inspire team would love to hear some of your pupils’ stories – why not share them on our Twitter feed or our Facebook page #NationalStorytellingWeek.