Children's Storytelling Circles

Children from Bigyn Primary School watched my new film, The Dragon Tree which is a New Folk Story for the West Wales Coastline, to give them inspiration for their own stories. The children were involved in the film making and have been performing live with me too.

 

So,  I asked the children to work with their teachers to write thier own coastal stories for the Children's Tale Trail at The National Botanic Garden of Wales.

 

As the Creative Director of the Event, I collect feedback from the children and teachers. At the Tale Trail last year, I was asked in that feedback, if the children could be storytellers as part of the event this year.

 

It's quite a different skill, being a storyteller, to being a story writer .. or even reading stories.

 

If I asked you to tell me the story of little red riding hood, you wouldn't need to read it from a book and you are so confident with the story that you could probably put all sorts of expressions in.

But that is more difficult with a brand new story that you have just written yourself.

 

To help the children, I have set up storytelling circles, where they  share and practise being storytellers to and with each other, giving constructive criticism. They then voted for which stories they wanted at the Event and which children they thought should be the storytellers.

 

The Bigyn Primary School children who will be Young Story Tellers within our team are:

Morgan Evans, Katie Duffy & Scarlett Morris Thomas who are working together as a story tag team to tell a group story, written by 7 children in their class. Tagging means that if one of them gets a little bit tongue tied, rather than stop, they give eye contact to the next person, who carries on the story ... and so on.

 

The other storytellers from Bigyn are individuals:

 

Bethany Wisdom who beautifully tells her story about a tricky situation she finds herself in.

Casey Price Williams who tells her story in the first person, as a 40 year old woman, looking back at her childhood.

 

Carla Canlin, Chloe Davies, Chloe Williams and Mollie may also be joining the line up with their stories.

 

The storytelling circle decided that there should be a reserve storyteller from Bigyn and this will be Jasmyn.