English - Story Telling

For Homework in English we got set to go away and learn a story and a poem off by heart.

Now this sounds like a simple enough task but when you actually try it becomes trickier, you worry you will  forget the order of the story or the words and end up looking silly in front of your peers, plus however much you practice your story there is always that one section which catches you out!

Me, Abi and Amy decided that as a group we would learn the story 'We're going on a Bear Hunt' and after listening to our English seminar lecturer talking about Pie Corbett and how he told stories we decided we were going to not only tell the story but tell it with actions, this helps make it more engaging and interactive for the children plus they can join in with your actions!

After researching the book 'We're going on a Bear Hunt' we discovered an amazing video of the author actually telling the story, with actions! You can look at the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc0U2WAz4s . He performs it in such a way that you can't help but be drawn in and want to get up and do the actions, its honestly a brilliant watch if you haven't seen it already.

This activity is a brilliant one to do with children, to tell a story and be able to tell it without having to refer to the book and to perform it with actions. When your children have learnt the story with the actions on the key words using Pie Corbett's method with words such as 'Once upon a time' which is performed as an action by miming opening a storybook they can then go on to do other activities based on what they've learnt.

We then looked at why storytelling is so important in the classroom and came up as a group with things such as it improves children's creativity and imagination, it helps with their cognitive development and improves their memory, it helps their language development by expanding their vocabulary and giving them a chance to practice their speaking and listening skills, and also that it is confidence building as if a child knows a story and are able to perform it.

Some ideas of activities you could set would be things such as creating a Story Map, Adapting the Story, Retelling it, Writing the Story from Memory, doing a piece of Drama or Role Play based on it, or even doing an Art activity such as creating puppets of the characters then going on to retell it. Anyway, that was our English seminar in a nutshell.