Storytelling in the Classroom (for teachers of 5-8 yr olds)
What you'll learn
- How to tell short traditional stories to your class with confidence, without notes or prompts, in a way that engages attention and sparks their imagination.
- The course will give you a ready-made repertoire of five stories to retell at once, building your storytelling skills as you learn the stories
- The course will demonstrate and develop the skills you need to find and perform more stories
- The stories in the course are ones that work particularly well with 5-8 yr olds, but the skills could be applied to stories for all ages.
Requirements
- Part of the course involves trying out your stories on a live audience, ideally weekly, ideally a class of children aged 5-8 yrs.
- No previous experience of storytelling required.
Description
In this course, you will learn essential storytelling skills by working on a new story in each of the five sections. The stories are supplied within the course, plus tips to find more of your own. They are traditional, but not very well-known stories, that work really well with 5-8 year old children (Katy has been using them in the classroom for over 20 years with great success).
In the first section, Katy introduces the basic techniques of remembering a story: working on plot structure and visualisation of the story world. The second section focuses on interaction, which is a key element of good storytelling with children. The third and fourth sections focus on using voice and gesture effectively to tell the story: these are important, but not essential for a beginner storyteller, so are treated at an introductory level. Each section also builds on the previous ones, by repeating the basic techniques until they are second nature. The fifth section is a recap of all techniques applied to a new story.
Many of the lectures are designed for you to pause the video and have a go yourself at exercises that Katy has demonstrated within the lecture, so you are not passively listening, but actively engaging with the material. So while the length of the video content is just over 3 hours, the course will take considerably longer, if you do all the exercises (allow 7-10 hours in total). Much of the course is suitable for learning to tell stories to any age group, but the stories have been chosen with younger children in mind and is excellent CPD for primary/elementary school teachers.
You are encouraged to complete a Storytelling Diary as you try out the stories with your class, and the final assignment is a self-assessment of your progress. The course would work well, completed over 5 weeks with you telling a new story to your class every week, but of course you can go at whatever pace suits you best. You are welcome to contact Katy with questions during the course and she will do her best to respond quickly.
Who this course is for:
- Primary school teachers
- Elementary school teachers
- Teacher trainees
Instructor
![Katy Cawkwell](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.9 Instructor Rating
- 54 Reviews
- 188 Students
- 1 Course
Katy Cawkwell has been delighting children of all ages with her storytelling performances and workshops for nearly 25 years. She runs regular workshops to teach storytelling skills to teachers and other adults interested in developing as storytellers. This course is a distillation of her educational work: she is passionate about supporting teachers to tell more stories in the classroom.
Katy works mainly with traditional tales (folktales, myths, legends etc...) and has worked for the education team of many British institutions including, for example, the British Museum, the Museum of London, Mayflower400 in Plymouth, Story Museum in Oxford, Whipsnade Zoo. She has also run countless workshops in schools across the UK and offered teacher training in international settings, for example, for the British Council in India.
"I am enormously appreciative of Katy's insightful, creative and practical guidance as I develop my solo storytelling skills [through online lessons]. Katy brings a huge wealth of expertise and a range of wonderfully helpful exercises, but also lots of encouragement, warmth and openness. I would highly recommend her to any budding storytellers!"
"Katy is a brilliant workshop leader. She clearly puts a lot of thought into preparing really useful sessions which she runs with great skill... Her commitment to traditional storytelling, her obvious love of the genre, and her skill as a story teller, shine out of every pore. I can’t recommend her courses highly enough to anyone who wants to explore their potential as a storyteller or to develop and build on existing experience."