Dragonfly: Storytelling & Story Acting for Early Years Children

Yesterday, April 18th, after work I was invited to attend a CPD session that was occuring at the school I am currently supplying at.  It was presented by Citizens Learning & TAG, and was entitled: Dragonfly:  Storytelling & Story Acting for Early Years Children.  The Introduction of their handout pack summarises the concept as "an intensive EY project that uses creative arts to empower the child.  The aims of Dragonfly are to place the child at the heart of his or her own learning and enhance the classroom community, making it a community where the children listen and speak freely" by putting "play, storytelling and story acting at the heart of each classroom".

I have skimmed the pack that I received during the session, but made my own notes during the interacting workshop.  The workshop presented a few concepts:

• "Is there more?" concept - a story creating technique that can be used with children.  The idea is that a child is asked to tell an oral story, and the progress of the story is moved along by someone asking non-leading questions, such as "is there more?"  During this part of the workshop it was discussed that this is not the most natural question to ask nor would you consistently ask the same question repeatedly, and so we came up with some other non-leading questions that we felt might feel more natural. 
• "yeah, and...?"
• "what next?"
• "and then what happened?"
• "and then?"
• "anything else?"
• "Acting out" concept for storytelling - this concept was interesting as it uses the child's own stories as the script for the impromptu performances. ***YOU CAN ALSO USE PUBLISHED STORIES / WORKS, IF YOU SO CHOOSE. The child stars in their own writing, giving them more creative license over their creation, but also an opportunity to include their classmates.  Have class sit in a circle around a marked out "performance" area.  Ask for or select a child (or the child) to begin acting out as the story is read aloud. With each new character, key prop, etc that another child could "perform" go around the circle and give the next child in line a chance on stage.  Describe to them the part that they can play and give them the choice of getting up; however also let them know that if they decline this time, that they must wait until it has gone all the way around and returns to them before they would get another chance to get up on stage.  SOME KEY POINTS DISCUSSED IN OUR WORKSHOP ABOUT THIS CONCEPT:  Use caution with violence; you may have to set up some boundaries before you being the writing exercise.  You must also use discretion when it comes to censorship, as this exercise is supposed to give them a relatively safe place to express themselves (REMEMBER: "...making it a community where the children listen and speak freely"; you also do not want to discriminate when reading / "acting out" the works the children have written.  What we discussed in regard to censorship, especially after the writing rules you establish, was reading quickly through the parts that you do not want to emphasise and not really have students act these parts out, and then emphasise, act out and comment on the appropriate key parts.  Remember, this is supposed to be writing where the children can "speak freely", so censorship is sort of contradictory to the main purpose and goals of Dragonfly.

There was a lot of good ideas presented during this workshop about bringing writing and drama together, having a child orally storytell and you recording verbatim what they tell you (is a good idea for children with lower literacy, who have a lot that they want to say, but would be unable to write all down on their own), etc.  Another good idea that was presented was having older students (Upper Primary (UK) or Middle School (Canada)) lead sessions where they are carrying out these concepts with younger primary students, rather than it be a teacher-led activity.  This way an older student and younger student get one-on-one time with each other (developing and writing stories, etc), which would not necessarily be possible if sessions were always teacher-led.