Ideas for Children's Storytelling in Large Group setting

Contact Time Proposal

School Year 2001

Purpose:

Reinforce the importance of character to the students. Provide educational and enriching activity in the school hall for P1, P3 and P5 students during the Wednesday Contact Time. Model that literature and learning can be a fun experience.

Activity:

Using classic children’s literature, read aloud stories with incentives for children to participate in various ways.

Contact with Literature – Storytime:

Using the multimedia computer program Power Point, and a laptop computer for projecting the illustrations from original books, read aloud from classic children’s literature.

As children hear the stories, ask those interested to use their drawing blocks and coloured pencils to create their own illustration to a scene from the story.

Collect these illustrations at the end of the Contact Time. Each time this is done, a few of the drawings would be selected to use the following Contact time. The familiar story would be read again the next time. However, this second time through the story, the student illustrations instead of the ones from the book would be used. Since these winning illustrations will be scanned for use in contact time, the illustrations could also be posted ahead of time on the website, encouraging the children to utilize the site.

This idea for using student illustrations could also be done by reading the story first with a particular class (the week ahead), and have all of the pictures provided by that class (However, this eliminates the element of surprise, and the possibility of keeping the children’s attention because looking for whether a picture done by themselves or someone they know).

Some Other Ideas to Incorporate During Storytime:

Utilize the members of the drama club, or volunteers from the audience, supply costumes for children to wear and pose as “life models” of the main characters. They would be asked to hold still, like mannequins through the reading of the story, and students can choose which of these characters they want to draw as they listen to the story. This can also be done creating “tableaux” where a few characters pose together recreating a scene from the story.

Assign “parts” to a few students. When this character speaks in the story, they provide the voice. These children would also be given the text of the story to read from.

Using stories with repetitive phrases or words, encourage the children to say these with the storyteller, or assign actions for the children to do when they hear certain words.

Sample Reading List:

Love: Guess How Much I Love You,  Sam McBratney

Loyalty: The Happy Prince, Oscar Wilde

Integrity: King Arthur, The Orchard Children’s Treasury, Andrew Matthews

Finders Keepers, Counting Leopards Spots, Orchard Treasury

Diligence: Cinderella,

Helen Keller’s Teacher, The Children’s Book of Heros, William Bennett

Harold & the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson

Responsibility: Do’s and Don’ts, Todd Parr

The Loser, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein

The Knights of the Silver Sheild, Children’s Book of Heros

Generosity: The Rainbow Fish, Marcus Pfister

Kindness: The Frog Prince,

The Legend of the Dipper, The Children’s Book of Virtues, William Bennett, ed.

Patience: The King and His Hawk, Children’s Book of Virtues, William Bennett, ed

Honesty: The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Courteous: What Do You Say, Dear?, Maurice Sendak

Please, The Children’s Book of Virtues, William Bennett

Courage: The Minotaur, The Children’s Book of Heros, William Bennett

St. George & the Dragon, The Children’s Book of Virtues, William Bennett

Self-Control: The Story of Jackie Robinson, The Children’s Book of Heros

Hungry Mungry, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein

Other resources for appropriate stories we enjoy are found in the Core Knowledge series by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (author of Cultural Literacy, and The Schools We Need), and the literature suggested in William Bennett’s The Educated Child.

Submitted to the PAPA committee 10 November, 2000

by Kimberly Creasman,