Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Reflection Exercises for Storytelling

We've been exploring telling stories to young children. This is the third week on this topic; time to reflect on how it is going. It's a good idea when we are trying something new or tweeking the way we do something to take time and consider whether it is working for us. Teachers learn to plan what to teach, teach and then evaluate the teaching. Parents are engaged in educating children and this template of planning, doing and then evaluating is an important life skill besides being for teachers. Even if the reflections are done in ten minutes before going to sleep at night (which may be the only available time),it is a good practice to strive for.

Remember Rahima Baldwin's book (that I mentioned in the last blog)called You Are Your Child's First Teacher? It's a valuable resource book. When I met Rahima at an Early Childhood Conference last summer, I found out that she was opening a home child care program with her daughter last fall. I was glad to have the opportunity to talk with her about opening a child care business as well as about early childhood education overall.

Back to reflecting about storytelling (rather than a trip to New Hampshire and interesting conversations last summer), and seeking a balance between actions and their inward component, reflections.

Here are some questions to ponder.

What kind of stories do you remember hearing during your childhood? What memories do you have of listening to stories?

Have you tried making up stories for your child, stories from everyday life, stories from your childhood and stories about your child? They can be short - even a few sentences long.
Does this feel different than reading a story from a book?
Is it easier or harder than you expected?
What was your child's reaction?

Reflect on some of your discoveries and successes.

Loving human contact is important for a child's well-being. How is this a component of storytelling? (Although this may seem obvious, conscious awareness about why we are doing something can inspire us to keep it up).

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Becoming the Author of Your own Life

Why do we tell our stories? We tell them to claim our role as the author of our own lives. Author is the root word of "authority" which has all kinds of connotations that might be incompatible with the simple idea of authoring our own lives but that is what I am talking about here.
Empowering ourselves and others to gain authority in our lives is the intent of telling stories and it is also the intent of this blog. Whatever you discover here is meant to be something you can experiment with or try on for size. See if it suits you and if it does, use it but if it doesn't ring true for you, let it go. You might find that you revisit it at another time or it is something you grapple with ongoingly. But clearly, these entries are not meant to be mandates because that would not further the intent of increasing the authority in parents so they can consciously author their own lives and then pass on this authority to their children when the child is ready to receive it.
Let's talk a little bit more about stories for young children. When is your child old enough for stories? Obviously it takes a certain maturity of language development for a child to listen to a story as well as the ability to sit still for a period of time. Until that time, children are still totally immersed in experiencing the things themselves. Take your cues from your child, and start with very short stories about your child's life, about the day, about animals or even your own childhood experiences. Then you can gradually work toward longer ones with repetition (which makes them easier to remember for the storyteller and children delight in them), and then into simple fairy tales.
The beauty of telling stories rather than reading them is that you can watch your child's response to the words as you are saying them. It also allows the child to create his/her own pictures from the story rather than the ones offered by the book's illustrator. It's not necessary to exagerrate the emotional content of the story but rather to tell it in a straghtforward sort of way with pauses (sometimes while you are thinking of the next thing to say). Be sure that if you make up characters, you remember the names, ages and other characteristics you give them because your children definitely will.

Suggestions for Stories to tell Young Children
Before the age of 3
Nursery rhymes sung and told (the rhythmical quality suits the young child)
simple repetitive stories
finger plays
nature stories
Stories you make up
Stories about the immediate environment

Three Year Olds
Sweet Porridge (Grimm)
The Turnip (Russian)
The Bun (Russian)
The Old Woman and the Pig (Volland Classic)
The Cat and the Mouse (Volland Classic)
Little Red Hen (Volland Classic)
Little Tuppens (Volland Classic)
My Household (Grimm)
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Billy Goats Gruff

To read more about storytelling with children, refer to Rahima Baldwin's book, You Are Your Child's First Teacher (a book one for every parents' shelf), pages 173 - 175"The Value of Telling Stories" in the section called "Nourishing Your Child's Imagination".

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Telling Stories to our Children

We've been working with singing and speech, let's consider now the art of telling stories. Children love them and we can all become storytellers for their sake, weaving in moral lessons we want to teach and connecting deeply with our children in the process. As with singing, we discover that we are all singers, we are also all storytellers even if we don't know it - yet.

Exerpt from "All About Kids" Magazine Feb. 1992

Don't Know and Pajamas
by Cathy Habes

After cookies, "Curious George" and kisses goodnight, I turn out the light. My four-year-old son says, "Tell us a story with no book." His two-year-old brother echoes the plea.

"Once upon a time," I begin, "there were two boys named Danny and Joey..." Then I pause.

When this ritual first began, I wondered what plot I could concoct from my sleepy brain that would possibly satisfy their hunger for stories. I found myself drawing heavily on plots in which they meet their favorite cartoon heroes and join forces with them in vanquishing the foes of Earth Itself.

"That was good." Danny would sigh afterward: but I was dissatisfied with my own junky thinking. Did an exciting story have to include fist fights and space ships?

As time passed, I polished my style a bit. Danny and Joey were written into the scripts of various gems of childhood literature that I knew by heart. Danny danced down the street with his friends in a rock'n roll version of rThe Pied Piper, encountered the Cat in the Hat. Each vied to be the brother who fell down the well in an adaptation of tTikki Tikki Tembo.

But I think I really hit on something when one night I simply repeated the details of the events of that day. Plain and simple, I told what happened from my point of view, and in the telling I found myself making Danny and Joey into the heroes of their own lives.

They demanded more such stories about "what we did today," delighted to hear about the adventures and successes of a routine trip to the playground. I dwelt lovingly on the details of each finger-painted picture done at the playtable and could repeat their friendly negotiations with playmates almost verbatim.

Nothing seemed to please them more than these intricate reaffirmations of their worth and progress. Then one night Danny asked me to tell him a story about something he desired - a pet, specifically a brown and white hamster named Pajamas. It was a touching request and a truly original one.

"What pet would you like in the story?" I asked Joey. "A Puppy?"

"An elephant!" shouted my two-year-old.

"What will his name be?"

"Don't know," Joey replied. So that night I told the first tale of Pajamas, the hamster and Don't Know the baby elephant.

The stories are still grounded in the day-to-day stuff of reality. Danny has played hide-and-seek with Pajamas, who hid in his shoe, under his bed, and behind his cereal bowl. Joey has taken Don't Know for a walk in the rain and had to clean the elephant's muddy feet with a broom and a bucket of water. We have speculated about what would happen if Pajamas and Don't Know went to the grocery store, the bowling alley, and kindergarten.

Mundane as they might sound, these stories are far more exciting, warm, and meaningful than the flat, relentlessly agressive tales I used to spin about Ninja Turtles. Now the boys often join in with their own ideas about the script. At the end of two short but thrilling tales, they are ready for sleep -- as long as I promise to tell more stories tomorrow.

It is delicious to feel my children grow and shine in the light of the stories of their lives. It is delicious, too, to experience my own stretching and growing. I had never dreamed I could craft an impromptu tale that would so delight a small audience. A bit of practice and experimentation was all it took to free the storyteller in me.

I don't think too much about my stories: I don't plan what I will say each night. I pause with my eyes closed in the dark room and wait to see what Pajamas and Don't Know are up to tonight. They have taken on a life of their own now, this odd couple invented by my children's hearts.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Reflection Exercises for "Speaking with Young Children" series

The last two blogs have been about becoming conscious of how we speak to our children.

Everything matters in our communications: what we say, how we say it, even what we are feeling and thinking while we speak. Children pick up on all of it so they wake us up to the true quality of our communications.

Below are a few questions that will help you reflect on your speech. Remember to be honest but also compassionate toward yourself, since we are all learning as we go.

Pay attention to the quality of your speech. Is it clear and well-formed (i.e. consonants on the ends of words)? What is your tone of voice like?

Is your child often asked to leave the "here and now" to answer a question? (For example -- What did you do at school today? or What's that you are building?) Is he/she able to do this? What effect do such questions seem to have on him/her?

Try to answer some of your child's questions with imaginative, pictorial answers rather than rational, scientific answers. What is the reaction?

If you have been offering fewer choices, how is it going?

Do you feel comfortable taking charge and claiming your authority as a parent? What was your experience of parental authority as a child?

Do these articles raise any questions or comments you would like to discuss? If so, comment here or bring them to class. Sharing amongst peers is a great way to process information and support each other in making changes or validating what we already do. Parenting is a journey in consciousness, full of both joys and sorrows and it is humbling to realize we have so much to learn right alongside our children.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Making up your Mind to speak to your Children like Children

An excerpt from a "Waldorf Newsletter"
written by Lucas G. Hendrikson in 1991

"Talking to 'Tiny Adults'"
There is a story that may be familiar to you, it goes like this: a four year old and her mother were sitting in a fast food restaurant; the father had gone for the food. When he returned, he asked the little girl whether she wanted to eat there or go home. The girl was quietly confused. "Well", he said, "Which shall it be - home or here? Make up your mind." the girl, still in a state of confusion, burst into tears. "Well, we're going home if you act like that," said her father, and off they went.
Scenes like this occur quite often. Loving parents, not wanting to inflict their will and desires upon their children, allow a child to make many decisions so that he can be his own person. Chilren are treated as "tiny adults". The social upheavals of the 60's can be viewed as the children of this nation casting off the will and desires of their parents in order to become their own people. Now, those children are parents and want freedom for their children. But is this freedom healthy? Is the unlimited ability to choose what children really need in order to fulfill their potential and become truly free?
In the Waldorf movement, we often use the analogy of comparing a child to a flower. The child is a seed which contains everything needed to become a beautifully unique flower. Our job as parents is to give the child a healthy environment so that she may blossom. Neither should we expect the young child to produce life decisions. Those decisions are the job of the parent.
Statements from my six-year-old daughter: "I'm gonna wear my shorts!" - in the middle of winter. "I will not eat that!" just after I finished cooking breakfast. "I'm not going with you! - when we have only a few minutes to leave for an appointment. My job is to help her understand that on many things, the decision lies with me. She has no choice. I know that it will help her to make decisions later in her life if she sees a strong example now of decision making in action. This must be done in a confident manner, without long explanations. I notice that she is often testing how strong the decision I have made is, and, if my decision is strong and calm she will have confidence in me and will feel secure.
We are indeed helping our children toward freedom - but it's freedom at 21 not at 5. The ability to learn to make decisions and carrying responsibility is a gradual process. This child needs experience in making decisions and carrying responsibility, but too often we see the children running the family. The parents ask the child, "Do you want to stay in kindergarten, or come home with me?" "Do you want to go to bed, or not?" These are not really choices, and we do the child a disservice by making it seem otherwise. If the parent has worked out that it is time for kindergarten, or bed, then the decision is made.
The child under seven is in a dream consciousness. This is good and healthy, and we should nurture it. Every question asks the child to "wake up" in order to accomplish the thinking necessary to respond. This drains forces he would otherwise use to build up his physical body. If, while we were sleeping, someone woke us up - just a little - and then, when we went back to sleep, woke us again and again, in the morning we would be quite crabby. This is what we do to the child when we demand decisions of him, only this 'crabbiness" works into his very being.
The child needs to sleep, and only gradually wake up to the world around him. The adult needs to nurture and protect the child, making firm decisions and being calmly confident in them. This calls adults to order, demanding much more consciousness on their part. Do I need to ask the child this? Does the child really have a choice here? How can I accept the responsibility for making decisions and nurturing my child and allowing her to do her job of building her body and her imagination? If we can bring our consiousness to these questions, our children can dream as they need to, and we can live joyfully without the "crabby child".

Next week - questions for reflecting on how we speak with young children.
Bring comments about this article to parent-toddler class and we can discuss them briefly at snacktime, providing support for each other in this work of conscious parenting.