Storytelling with Kids

Our story circles are usually "a movable feast". As I've mentioned in another post , story circle can happen practically everywhere: indoors or outdoors, online or in person. The location and the method of delivery can also change as the circumstances change: the weather is nice? Let's move outside! Flu season and lots of kids sick at home? Let's have a virtual meeting! This is why I find it very helpful to have a handy "portable story circle classroom", to take with me to whatever location we're meeting at this week. Artist and art educator Nona Orbach, the author of "The Good Enough Studio: Art Therapy Through the Prism of Space, Matter, and Action", describes  here  how in the times of covid lockdowns and restrictions she helped her students to organize their own individual tiny studios with some paper and pencil cases. I found Orbach's story really inspirational: you don't need a big well stocked studio to create art. You also d...

When my big kiddo (now he's 9) was born, I spent a lot of time researching and looking for inspiration on kids rooms design. I was particularly moved by a photo of a nursery with reading corner: narrow shelves with beautiful board books on them, and above them big letters saying "READ TO ME". That was exactly was I intended to do: I was going to read to my child. And I did. I started reading to him from the day he was born (well, maybe I waited for when we brought him home), and I has been reading to him ever since. But my kid had a mind of his own, and soon enough he was participating in the reading activity in ways that I didn't anticipate. He chewed on some of the books (the most funny example was him chewing on "The very hungry cuterpillar", a book that tells about a caterpillar that... well, chews through a lot of things). He wanted to read books in certain order, not necessarily the one intended by the author. He wasn't interested in so...

I've started several storytelling communities in the last couple of years. Since storytelling is so innate to us humans, and kids especially are so eager to get together to share good stories, starting the community was actually the easiest part (maintaining it was a different story, and will get another post). Here's some lessons I've learned along the way: - Find a common ground. Storytelling is very wide and all inclusive field. Find something you'd like to focus on, and stick to it with your audience. In my case, once it was a storytelling club for bilingual kids with focus on the minority language. Another time it was an online club for kids in isolation who can't attend school in person. Just find a good cause that you believe in and invite the people to join! - Define the age range of the participants. I'm a firm believer in working together with kids of different ages, but they shouldn't be *too* different. Usually 2-3 years is a good ran...

Hello lovely people, and thank you for visiting! My name is Olga, and I’m a storyteller. I wasn’t even aware that I’m a storyteller. My kiddo started the first grade in September 2020, the COVID year. After a week of in-person school, his class, like the rest of the classes throughout Israel and all over the world, was sent home to online learning. Online learning of preliterate first graders is a challenging experience on many levels, but what concerned me the most was the fact that kids that just started school together have no chance to meet and to connect with each other.  To try and remedy that, I organized a daily story hour. Actually, half an hour. Or really, 45 minutes of allotted free zoom meeting time. The premise was: no lockdown without a story. We chose a book. I've divided it into 6 parts/chapters. Each workday we've read a chapter. Reading a chapter was mostly an excuse for virtually hanging out together, day after day. But before we started reading, the kids cha...