It's all about stories!: Storytelling

Storytelling. As I have learnt, it's a very different thing from picking up a picture book and reading it to the children. Hawthorn Press have sent me two lovely books about storytelling - The Natural Storyteller by Georgiana Keable and Storytelling with Children by Nancy Mellon.

The Natural Storyteller (wildlife tales for telling) is a collection of tales for telling. As the author herself puts it "this book is a seed packet, full of amazing story seeds.

When you open the book and read a story seed, you plant it in yourself. The more you water this seed, the bigger it will grow, unleashing courage, creativity and love of nature" She invitingly gives us some reasons for wanting to become a storyteller, including "you can wear a cloak". Who's not going to want to be part of this now? Georgiana Keable retells traditional stories from many cultures here, all exploring themes of interdependence and sustainability. But she doesn't just give us a book full of stories to tell, she takes us on a journey, giving us tips, and sharing activities, as well as a challenge to the reader - have a story party and try telling some of these tales yourself. I'm not ready for that quite yet, but am certainly going to be trying out "storytelling" with the little ones I work with, rather than "story-reading". I was also pleasantly surprised and interested to find that one of the first stories in the book is "The Pedlar of Swaffham" - which just so happens to be the town where I grew up! And the author includes with this story, an illustrated story map to help us retell the tale without having to read the words from the page. This is a book to inspire and I highly recommend it.

"Storytelling with children" is an introduction to the art of storytelling. As I read it, I discover that what I had thought of as "storytelling" was actually "story-sharing" or "story-reading". I spent years with my two children from when they were very very small, to when they were almost teenagers, sharing stories together, on the top of the bunk bed cuddled up, or in the big brown chair. We shared picturebooks from authors like Eric Carle and Mick Inkpen and Shirley Hughes, and chapter books like Stig of the Dump and Treasure Island. And we loved it. But storytelling is different, as Nancy Mellon shows us. It is an artform. It is a skill learned over time.

This book is for parents, and anyone who works with, cares for or grandparents, small (or big) children. Nancy Mellon gives us many anecdotes of real people's experiences of becoming storytellers, the opportunities they took, the different kinds of stories they weaved, and the voices they express. She goes on to give us inspiration for our storyteller's treasure trove - ideas from the memories of our days apart, memories of our younger selves or stories from our imaginations which could be spontaneous or built from elements like fire, air, colour or temperament. She begins to teach us how to learn stories by heart so we can satisfy little ones' urges to hear our stories "again, again". A delightful addition to the storyteller's repertoire might be a storyteller's apron with many pockets for story props - reminiscent of Quentin Blake's Angelica Sprocket.

Nancy Mellon goes on to give us inspiration for storytelling around the theme of growth and change, adapting the storytelling for older children whose imaginations and sense of humour allow more complex stories to be shared; and she also explores storytelling around life's changes such as birth, illness, death and ,moving on. In the final 2 chapters she shares ideas for storytelling linked to the changing seasons, and provides connections between storytelling, family and wider community. And that is exactly what we need in these modern, changing times; for people to connect with each other within families and within their communities so that we can begin to build metaphorical bridges around the world, enabling us to solve issues like climate breakdown and biodiversity loss by working together. The author reminds and inspires me that storytelling has the possibility to instil such a sense of belonging to the earth that we might collectively work to save it.

Laurence King publishers have sent me a related title, Children's Picturebooks, the visual art of storytelling by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles. This is an illustrated guide for students of, or anyone interested in, illustration, or aspiring artists, illustrators and writers. They cover the history of the picture books and look at how picturebooks are one of our very first encounters with stories, language and the written word. They introduce us to the publishing industry, editorial and printing processes, as well as the recent rise of non-fiction picture books.

Our storytelling

In our own work, we have discovered that exploring the outdoors inspires our creativity and imagination, so we are inspired to begin to create stories around the locations we find ourselves in - the old city wall tower and the little wooden knight I found in my bag that day, or the big bowl roundabout at the park which the children filled with all sorts of twigs and grasses and sticks and told us all about their soup making. Here are some images from our own story-making -

Making our own stories - the Tiny Knight, Green Soup, and the Bird Seed Day

The Knight's Gate