Reading/telling stories

Gail on the floor :)

I read stories from either a chair or on the floor, but I especially love being on the floor with the children. In this instance, I prep them by singing, "It'll be coming around the circle as it comes", to the tune of, "She'll be coming around the mountain". This helps cut down on the cries of, "I can't see it", when I am showing the book to one part of the circle. I think that sharing a book this way encourages patience and a sense of community--why not enjoy your classmates faces enjoying the story before or after you have? 

Even though it is totally OKAY to read a story to children word for word (how many books can one memorize, after all?), it is so much better to really know your story ahead of time. After you have read a book many times you begin to know it so well that you know the structure of the story (is it a repeating, or expanding pattern story? Does it have places where children can be asked, "What do you think s/he will do?" or "How do you think s/he feels?". Is there a refrain you can include the children in so that they are part of the telling? (believe me, the more they are able to participate, the better they pay attention!). After a time with the same group of children over the course of a year, I've found that some of them will guess what kinds of questions you will ask, or what the pattern of the story is.

Using props is also a very effective way of involving children in a story. Felt board stories still excite young children. If you drop a piece, they will laugh and you can be in on the joke. Mistakes by a teacher create community, too. Sharing a story in this manner is an age-old technique. Making puppets for the story is also effective. The advantages of using props is that, not only can you "hook" the visual learner with moving parts, but then you may also place the props in a literacy center for use by children. They enjoy retelling the story with them. You encourage memory and understanding by involving the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities of learning. If you are all thumbs with felt, and don't have money for those expensive sets, you can use Google Images to find pictures to laminate and back with a magnet. Magnet board stories are just as effective.

I took a course at The Kennedy Center called Tiny Toy Tales, taught by the wonderful Sean Layne. We made boxes to house the props for a story, including little toy characters. They were based on story books, but we were provided with a script for retelling the stories that gave the children something to do to participate in the telling. The scripts were layered with the learning of concepts that are required in learning standards. But the children wouldn't suspect they were being "taught" these concepts. They just enjoyed the telling (and retelling). The box can then be put in the literacy center. One of my tiny toy tales (Trashy Town) was in our literacy center this week.

Story sharing from picture books needn't be a case of the teacher sitting on a chair while obedient (!) little tykes watch and listen. Children come in all different flavors...er...learning styles. We are told to differentiate instruction. We can do this with story-telling or reading, too. I have shared some of my thoughts about this. Please share yours, also. 

Preserving the old, preparing the new.

This is one of the WPA mosaic tiles built into the walls of the North End Pavilion at Spring Lake (NJ) Beach. That pavilion was totally destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. The tiles, we heard, had been removed for safe-keeping before the storm. The new pavilion is an almost exact replica of the old one, which is such a joy to those of us who thought that a new construction would be a new look. Even better, there are replicas of the old tiles in place. To those of us who love the Jersey Shore, this was the right thing to do.

New and original architecture, and new art are good for culture and society. New and original people are, too! Once the WPA employed artists were the breath of fresh air, the innovators, the vanguard of art in the early 20th century. When I think of how the government actually financed them, I feel such pride that the U.S. Government saw employment of artists as equally important as employment of steel workers or machinists. This attitude towards the arts has not been carried along into the new century.

Ironically, teaching through the arts has been shown in research to be the most integrating path to healthy, mature and consistent learning. I find that using the arts as a pathway motivates students to bring all of their own "human capital" to their efforts. Just as those early WPA artists, paid by Uncle Sam, threw their best efforts into working with other craftsmen to produce useful and beautiful buildings, our students will work through the arts to produce beautiful "products" that demonstrate what they have learned. New and original people are the human product of this approach. 

Teaching through arts integration is rigorous. Students must address learning standards in both the arts and in other subjects, such as history, literature, science and math. They use their hands, bodies, voices, feelings AND intellect in the learning process. This is what we call, in the Early Childhood field, integrated curriculum. There are many ways teachers can learn this approach, one being at the Kennedy Center's CETA (Changing Education Through the Arts) program. Becoming a CETA school means getting teaching artists into your building. Wolf Trap also works with schools to train teachers to teach through the arts. There are many online resources ask well. Here is one example of a digital documentation of teaching both visual art and mathematics to kindergartners, and here are examples of lessons for grades 5 through 8 addressing both social studies and language arts.

An old building is not always worth replicating. Certainly old teaching methods aren't, either. We need to teach to the whole person, preserving the best the arts and education have to offer. Let's not ignore this challenge.