The Lost Art of Story Telling: Rekindling the Love for Make-Believe in Our Children

I have always loved telling stories. I wrote my first book for my little sister when I was nine years old, fully illustrated. I doubt she was much interested, but she pretended to be, and at the time, that was enough. I loved writing and telling stories through plays and puppet shows to my over worked, but always attentive Mother, and I loved doing it with my siblings. We seemed to get along when we were no longer our selves, but characters that were outside of ourselves. We played endless games outside and in that didn’t involve the TV (which was admittedly only a nine inch black and white, and not that interesting). We were characters on ships, pirates and sailors. We were settlers on a wagon train. We were pilots in space ships battling aliens on other worlds. We were characters from Star Wars, or the Muppets, or so many others. The point is, whether we were any good at story telling or not, we did it. Constantly. And we loved it.

Now, all grown up, I still love telling stories, and do so-to my son, my classes, my friends, my husband…really to any body who will listen to me dither on and not be too rude about telling me to be quiet when they don’t want to listen anymore. In doing so, I think, that at the very least I’m a more interesting person, and I hope that I can communicate and problem solve better for my practice in the make-believe.

Unfortunately, I have found that this skill is increasingly disappearing from the kids that come through my classroom. Public Schools-overworked, understaffed and under funded-have little time for what is not considered a ‘core’ group of study, and the imagination is increasingly frowned upon. I don’t think this has happened on purpose, far from it. I think it is a symptom of a broken education system that lags behind much of the rest of the western world. Since I am fortunate enough that I have the time and facilities in my art classes and after school group that I can encourage writing for the fun of it, and story telling, and make believe, I do so.

When I first get a group of kids into my classroom, one of the first things we do is begin a story writing journal. I often have a theme to begin with, to get kids started. This semester it is ‘Ancient Egypt, a Journey Through the Underworld’. We talk a little bit a day in our ‘circle-time’ (or cabal as it was dubbed by a sixth grader a few years ago) about Ancient Egyptian culture, religion, and show pictures and have books available to look at. Then they spend about ten minutes writing on that theme. Occasionally I will give them questions or set up scenarios, like what was a job you would have had in ancient Egypt, and then later, how did you die. The next day the children will read some of their work to the group, if they wish, and some times we will publish them in our newsletter for parents. Sometimes we do ‘write-back’ stories, in which they will start by writing a paragraph and then I will ‘write-back’ and add onto the story. By the middle of the semester the kids are motivated and eager for the writing, and I sometimes have to tell them to stop and do the homework for their class!