Storytelling in Schools
What's New
We've finished the first release of this web site. Please share your comments with us.
Jackie Baldwin jackie@story-lovers.com
Kate Dudding kate@katedudding.com
The Storytelling Classroom: Applications Across the Curriculum by Sherry Norfolk, Jane Stenson, and Diane Williams
Libraries Unlimited, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006
Keywords: elementary education, middle school
ABSTRACT
From the beginning of time, storytelling has been the means by which cultures and societies have preserved and celebrated their memories, passed on their values and belief systems, entertained, instructed and reported. Long before there were written records, storytellers taught through the oral tradition.
Today, teachers can employ this age-old educational tool with the assurance that it still works! In fact, recent brain-based research supports intuitive belief in storytelling with empirical evidence. In Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain (Addison-Wesley, 1994), Renate and Geoffery Caine state, "There is strong reason to believe that organization of information in story form is a natural brain process...We suggest that the brain research confirms that evidence and begins to explain why stories are important."
The book The Storytelling Classroom is an inspiring, practical and immediately applicable collection of pre-K through eighth grade lesson plans for and by teachers who use storytelling in the classroom and storytellers who work in the classroom. Each lesson plan is linked to National Standards in Language Arts, Social Studies, Mathematics or Science and accompanied by an essay which provides a glimpse of the alchemy that occurs when students, teachers and story are brought together: student engagement, classrooms that are alive with thinking students, learning!
Storytelling is a power tool for education. Everything we do in the modern world is connected to story and the more adept we are at telling stories, the more connected our society will be as it relates to all forms of communication.
Click here to find out more about this book.