Emergent Writing + Storytelling
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Stories That Stick with me, Laura, as your resident storyteller. I'm here to show you how oral stories inspire and captivate minds young and old. Tune in each week to hear a compelling story and join in meaningful conversations. I'll be digging deep into the heart of storytelling, connection, and listening.
So whether you're a kid, teacher, caregiver, grandparent, or simply a lover of stories, this podcast is for you. Join me as you get lost in another world and discover how stories shape our lives. Here's to the next page in our story.
Welcome to today's episode of Stories That Stick. Today I have with me Jen Zollinger of Play Before Pencils, and she's an early childhood educator that is really supporting and helping educators shift away from teacher led practices to embracing more organic, developmental [00:01:00] appropriate practice around play.
And what has always really caught my eye is The way that she shares and thinks about early literacy. So it's no surprise. I have invited her onto the podcast so we can talk and we're going to think and talk a bit about emergent writing and how this is connected to storytelling and her experience with embracing more storytelling with the children in her lives.
So Jen, I'd love to hear about you, what brought you here, and I'm so glad to have you. Thank you, Laura. I'm excited to be on the podcast today. Just a little bit of background on, I've been in the early childhood field for a long time. I would have to do some math over 20 years. I, and even, I don't know, probably.
Nearing up on 30 if we count going back to when I was in high school and took a child development course just because it was going to be an easy elective credit and had some experience there running the little preschool that they do, each [00:02:00] semester to help students learn. A little bit more about what the early childhood field looks like.
And when I left that class, I really had no intention of pursuing early childhood. It was not on my radar. I was headed more toward the medical field. I got into nursing school. And had my last semester before nursing school started, I needed an extra elective and I took just a, they called it service learning and we were assigned a place in the community where we would just provide volunteer hours over the course of the semester.
And I was put in a special needs school. And so I worked with students with disabilities for that semester and found that I just really loved it. And so I took a complete shift in my path and said, I'm not going to go to nursing school anymore. I'm going to go toward education. And so I got a degree in special education and still was not thinking anything about early childhood.
But at the last minute, I [00:03:00] decided I would tack on an early childhood. A dual degree with early childhood. Along with that, because I just felt it's an extra semester, but it will open up more options for jobs down the road if I need that. And it was in that portion of my college education that I just really found a great love for early childhood.
I loved learning about brain development. I loved seeing it in action in the classroom. I had some really good practicum experiences in the university child development lab where I was just really able to see what best practice looks like. And when you embrace that, how much learning can take place. And then I actually landed my first job was in a special education preschool classroom, and I've been in preschool ever since so honestly I haven't used my, I don't want to say I haven't used my special education degree because there's never been a school year that's gone by where I haven't had a student with, even if it's just a speech delay, but some sort of a [00:04:00] disability that they may be on an IEP for that I have been able to support, but I've really honed in on that early childhood aspect and In the state that I live, we live in, we don't have universal pre K.
And so if I wanted to teach in that public school setting, it would be in a special education classroom, which is fine. It just is more than I want to take on with my family in the stage of life that we're at right now. So I've just been working in part time preschool programs. I took a little break to raise my kids when they were young.
And then I headed back and just did in a commercial preschool in my community and it was very academic. And it was I really, I had a background in play as far as what I had learned in college, but I had never really seen it done super well in practice once I got teaching, and I didn't see a lot of support for that.
And so I didn't, I left that a little bit, left that knowledge behind and I was like, Oh, it's academic. We're going to teach kids to read. And [00:05:00] I was all on board with that. And my youngest was in preschool with me. She wasn't in my class, but she was attending the school. And I remember making a post on my social media, just my personal page, showing her reading at four years old and, almost bragging about how smart she is.
And I was really focused on that. But over time I started to just feel a lack of contentedness in that position, and I was seeing a lot of behaviors that I, it surprised me because I was in a regular education setting, and I was seeing behaviors that were more extreme than my students that had disabilities that affected their behavior.
And that didn't, there was a disconnect there for me. It was like, what's going on here that's causing this to happen? And I started to realize that there's just no, I'm coming to work for two and a half hours. I am telling these children everything that they have to do. Everything they do comes from me.
It's time to sit down and listen. It's time to move to the rug. It's time to do the calendar. [00:06:00] It's time to do this. There was no freedom for them to choose. almost anything during that time. And once I made that connection I thought I need to make a change. This is not good for any of us. I'm not happy here.
I can tell that the children are not happy here. And that's when I really started researching play a lot more in depth and realizing what a benefit that could be to embrace a more child led Philosophy and I looked back to my college years where I was really intrigued by the Reggio philosophy and so I started studying that a little bit more and I made the decision that I would leave that position I was working in and I would just open a program in my home.
And so it's very small, but it is tailored to what I need for me and for my family and for the children that I serve in that program. And so it has been, I'm going, I'll be starting my third year in that program this fall. And it's really been a dream come true and a lot of learning along the way.
A lot of trial and error of things that I'm doing, but so much more fulfilling than what I [00:07:00] was doing previously. What a journey. Yeah, it is. It is. And a long one at that. Yeah. And this feels like you said, a dream come true. A dream you didn't even know you had until you had. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And I am curious. Do you sometimes wonder how, I don't know I might've missed the timeline there, but how long you were in that kind of quote unquote academic preschool. Do you look back now and wonder like, how did I do that for so long with those children now that you see, the difference, and you see the way that children can guide their own learning and the types of support that you can do. For me, that's always that moment. Yeah. And I wasn't, I want to say I was there, I was only there for four years. And so it wasn't a super duper long time in that particular program. Thankfully, [00:08:00] it didn't take me that long to figure that out and be able to move on.
And I feel like when I was teaching in the public school program, the special education program, there were so many different focuses, we were focusing on therapies and these were children that had more severe disabilities. And so they were. We weren't worrying a lot about the academics, we're just trying to expose them to sensory experiences.
And so I didn't have that there. That was a very different experience than what I was having in this other program. But thankfully it didn't take me too long and I didn't, I don't want to say I didn't waste too much time because I think that was valuable time spent with the things that I learned while I was there.
But I'm grateful that didn't go on for 10 years before I realized that it could be done better. Yeah. In this really different way, right? And with that, I know, what has brought you, it seems especially with the Play Before Pencils that there's this [00:09:00] draw that you have to, emergent writing.
Where did that come from or what sparked that for you? That actually started back when I was very first teaching in that special education classroom. I remember there was a little There was a paper taped to one of the cabinets and it just showed the stages of emergent writing and I didn't pay a lot of attention to it, we're just trying to figure out how to even get our students to be able to hold a writing implement, let alone make a mark with it but I had a student that came along, her name was Annie and she had I don't know exactly, I can't remember exactly what her disability was, but she had a congenital disease that affected her muscles and so she didn't, she had very low tone and she really didn't have the strength to do very much, but she wanted to be able to write her name.
And so we worked really hard in her occupational therapist worked with her a [00:10:00] lot and we worked really hard to be able to get her to a point where she could hold a pencil and start making a mark. And over time, I had these students for three years. So I was able to see a lot of progress over the course of that time.
She got to where she could write her name just very faintly on a piece of paper. And at one point, she started writing her name backwards. All of the letters were like in a mirror image. And I thought, Oh, that's so interesting. I had never seen that before. And then it evolved to where they were not only mirror image, but they were upside down as well.
And I thought, Okay, this is so interesting. Is something cognitively going on here that we should be concerned about? And we just watched it. And over time, those letters came back around. flip right side up, and then she just moved on. And it was at that point that I just happened to notice, again, that paper that was on the cabinet door, and one of those pages that mentioned that some children will start to [00:11:00] invert their letters as they are learning to write.
And from that time on, I saw that numerous times as I watched children begin to learn to write. And it always just absolutely fascinated me and I would get really excited. It didn't happen for everybody, but when it did, I'm like, Oh, parents, look at this really cool thing that your child's brain is doing right now.
Because I know if I sat down and tried to write my name in mirror image, it would take a significant amount of brain power for me to do that and make it look that right. But they just sit down and bust it out. They don't even give it a second thought. And so that kind of was what sparked my interest in emergent writing, and it was just something that I noticed and watched as children began to pick up a pencil and start making marks and see that process unfold.
I just, it just was something that excited me, and I latched on to that as something that I wanted to learn more about, and when I got into that program that I recently left, they were very big on worksheets. And it was an [00:12:00] interesting experience to see. I had never used worksheets before in my classroom.
But in this school, they really embraced that to see how limited they were in their writing when all they had was this one piece of paper that they were given a day to trace and copy letters. There wasn't paper available anywhere else in the classroom for them to access. There's a lot of things about this school we could go into.
And again, I love the people who run it. And so it makes me sad that it was such a developmentally inappropriate place. But, yeah, that was all they had. That was the only access to paper and pencil they had during the school day, and they would get that a couple times a week. And I just thought they're missing out on so many opportunities here.
And so it's been really fun in my own program to be able to provide a lot, a wealth of opportunities for emergent writing to take place. Yeah. I could totally geek out on the progression of emergent writing as well, because I just think it's one of those things that [00:13:00] it, there's something tangible that we can grasp onto, because we see it, and it's like without fail, they go from this like unintentional mark making they're just like scribbling, unintentional scribbling, to a very intentional scribbling, to the point where oh, I know this is so and so's, writing versus so and sos because their intentional mark making is so different and intentional to then that when they're making some strokes and then it's looking letter like and then they're exploring and I always also thought it was so interesting because Print, written letters, are so different than a lot of the other things that we teach child children, right?
We show them a triangle, and we're like, this is a triangle. And then we flip it upside down, and this is a triangle. And this is a triangle, and this is a triangle, and this is a triangle. And when it's big, it's a triangle, and when it's small, it's a triangle. And when it's inverted, and this and that. And then we take a P, and we're like, this is a P.
But invert it, and it's a D. And now flip it, and [00:14:00] it's a B, right? What a mind trip! Because what we're telling them with shapes doesn't apply to letters. Doesn't translate. Three and four year olds, they're just a symbol. They're just a symbol. They're just a symbol. And when they are trying to make sense of that and they're like, drawing the letters upside down or inside out or whatever, it's always so fun.
And then of course, for me, my favorite is when the phonetic writing starts and what fun that is as the educator to try to decipher, what they wrote or to see the really interesting ways that they are writing. The sounds and words that they hear. It's so fun for me to see that. Awesome. So I'm curious, like, when you think about emergent writing and storytelling, what is the connection there?
Yeah, so I feel like writing is communication, whether it's a scribble or whether it's a string of letters like a word. The person using that writing is communicating something and storytelling is also communication. And, we [00:15:00] have a rich tradition of oral storytelling. That's how so many stories that we have were passed down was orally over the years.
But there's also a tradition of written stories. And so that connection between the two, I feel when I'm thinking about my students and stories, they start very young with Expressing and telling stories and that flows so beautifully into emergent writing as they're able to see us modeling writing when we write down their stories, if they choose to have them written down we see that when they start to.
Write their own stories. And a lot of times when we think of emergent writing, people are thinking about letters and words and I'm, encompassing that in a much more broad sense that whatever mark they are putting on the paper is part of their emergent writing And that is part of their process of telling their stories.
And that whether they're intentionally writing a story, quote unquote, or whether they're just simply making a mark and [00:16:00] communicating something, I, you can ask, tell me about what you're drawing or whatever. There's always something behind it. And that often will turn into something more elaborate that forms into a story.
And so I love in my classroom. When students, I have so many videos, I take a ton of pictures and a ton of videos as we're working throughout the day to be able to have a student bring me something that they've created and tell me what the story is behind it. And they're so detailed sometimes. I have one little boy that I can think of who absolutely loves sea life and He creates octopus and squids and all kinds of things with whatever materials are at his disposal.
If it's blocks, we might have a squid the size of our huge rug that he's created. And when he started bringing that into his writing, it was so much fun to see the stories behind them and how they interacted. And he would draw his [00:17:00] little squid and, the squid might be the main character.
And then he would Bring in a shark, and the shark would have something that he wanted to eat the squid, whatever, and he would really like start to plan this out, until by the time he ended my program, he was making multiple page books of his stories and all through, through that He's working on his writing skills because he wants to have a way to, to document his story, to put that on paper, to be able to take it home and show it to his family, to tell that story to somebody else and have them see what he created.
And I just found that as children recognize that what they are writing is a story. They embrace it as a story and they really get excited and take ownership of that and it really, they're much more inclined to sit down and actually take part in writing that. Absolutely. I think the one thing that you said is it can be limiting for us to [00:18:00] think that a child writing their story, it can only look one way in the same way that saying a child's or a child's play should only look one way, right?
We should really need to expand that box. And one of my favorite things to see when a child is intention, mark making or drawing something or whatever it is on, and then they're bringing it to you and they tell it to you. And. Then the next time, maybe it's 20 minutes later or the next day, it's the same, right?
Because that's a really key thing that it doesn't happen, that's like that pivotal moment where they tell you this says, the squid was chasing the shark and then 15 minutes later, they come over and they're like, Oh, this says the whale was with the squid. So you know they haven't held on to that in that writing development when we think about where they are and in crafting a story and that print carries meaning and it always says the same thing but when they say this says, the [00:19:00] squid was chasing the shark and the next day they can read their own writing in whatever format that was, whatever format that looks like, that is That really pivotal moment where they're starting to really understand so many important concepts about print and what writing and stories are.
So that's a really, yeah. Yeah. And I think about the same little boy that wrote. Wrote this particular book that I had a video of that he absolutely loved that he created and drew all of the pictures for this, and then he asked me to sit down and write his dialogue that the next day it was the same story that he told.
And as he looked at the pictures, he remembered exactly what he wanted each of those drawings to be on the page. And because I wrote it down exactly like he told it, it wasn't like he said, this and this happened. And then I wrote it in grammatical. Grammatically proper form, but I'll, I wrote it exactly the way he said it.
And he remembered that's exactly the [00:20:00] way he said it. And I know that if I had done a little differently and inserted my own little things to clarify or to add a word that made it make sense a little bit better, that he would have picked up on it because that story was his. And he loved that having that story retold to him exactly the way he intended it.
It really was empowering to him to continue creating stories. Absolutely. You honored his voice. That was his voice in whatever way he told it with the run on sentences or the sentence that didn't exactly make sense or the repetition of words, whatever it may have been. You honored it, and you didn't alter it, and that's what I find so powerful when I do storytelling and story acting with the children and write down their stories exactly as they say it, is we're showing them what you say matters, and I don't know better than you, and it can be that bridge to help some of those children that I'm sure you've come across that say I want to write a [00:21:00] story, but I can't write.
They already have this perception of themselves as not being a writer, as not being a storyteller, which I don't think I've ever heard a child say I can't tell you a story. Maybe they get a little hesitant, but they do see themselves as players, right? They know how to play.
Rarely do they say, I don't know how to play. They might say they're bored, but they are very quick to say, I can't read or I can't write when they actually have some of those skills because they have this perception because there is so much complexity. They see us writing and they're like, I can't write like that.
I can't draw like that. They're not drawing a cat in the same way that we're drawing a cat. And so what are some ways that you support? That you know that barrier that they may have that perception of themselves is not a writer as not a storyteller is not a drawer, because maybe they don't have that all those fleets free flowing skills yet, and they don't see themselves in that way.
Yeah, I can say I, I feel like [00:22:00] it's usually with my students who You know, they start out, they come to me at three years old and I have them until they go to kindergarten. So some of them are turned five, some are still four. But I feel like it's once they start getting onto that older end, those kinds of fears start to crop up with them because they're becoming a little bit more aware.
They have more skills in their tool belt, but they don't have enough skills in their tool belt. And they're noticing that where when you have the three year olds that are scribbling and drawing, they're happy with whatever they don't realize, they aren't aware of that yet. And so it is something that as my students start to get a little bit older and a little bit more skilled I try, there's always the building up, but I, one thing that I like to do is writing stories together, so we might do it as a whole class, we might do it me and another student on, one on one, we might do it with a small group, just depending on what the situation is, that I'm maybe the scribe, but they get to share their voice and don't have that pressure.
I want [00:23:00] to tell a story, but I don't really know how or I want to record a story, they'll tell a story, but I do I want to record a story and know how it takes that pressure off a little bit when we're doing it in and sometimes it looks like. I'll start the story with a sentence and then they'll fill in the next sentence and we craft this story.
We don't really know where it's going because we're each contributing to it. So sometimes it just is a matter of taking that pressure off that here's an opportunity to tell a story, but you're not expected to do the writing part of that. Sometimes I like to have I'll do like little index cards.
Like with, for example, this little boy that loves the sea life, he has a little ring full of index cards that have words like squid and octopus and those key words that I know he's drawn to in his storytelling so that he can get that at any time. Sometimes I'll put a sticker on it, over time they begin to recognize they know what that word is, but I'll put a sticker of an octopus so that I know that this word represents [00:24:00] this item.
And that's something that he has at his disposal anytime where he can go copy the letters that he sees. His skills are such that he could do that. And that gives him some independence while still having a little bit of help to be able to write those words down. And it's interesting. He was one. He would tell me elaborate stories that I would write down.
But once he hit the point in his writing skills where he could do some copying of those words, he stopped asking me to write the stories down. And so now all of a sudden his storybook goes from, this is the octopus and the shark wants to eat the octopus. It doesn't say that anymore. It might still have the picture of the shark and the octopus, but it might just say shark and octopus.
To him, he knows the story, but he did the writing. And so we don't have the details necessarily, but he feels so much more accomplished because he put the words on the page. And that was, a big thing for him to do. So I [00:25:00] like to do that with students who have expressed an interest in writing their own words.
Not all students want to do that because. They don't feel confident yet. And that's okay. And one thing that I will say is that I always have paper and clipboards and, markers and pencils. They're all over the classroom. So that wherever a student is, they can access those things.
To write a story, to draw a picture, whatever it is, and then it doesn't feel quite on, on display. Maybe they can take those things into their corner, where they're building with their blocks, and they can write on it what they want, and nobody's going to be there saying, Oh, tell me about what you're drawing.
What is that about? I think there is some power in having children tell you what they're drawing, but sometimes we just need to step back and let them draw and tell their story and wait for them to say, I want to, I want you to write this down. It doesn't always have to be recorded.
And allowing for some space for that so that there's not pressure that they have to record and create their story in a certain way. And the difference [00:26:00] between there being maybe, I remember a practice that I used to do with the curriculum that I had with four year olds in a kindergarten, in a pre K is, it was a well intended small group where I would have made books out of construction paper and paper.
And I would like on the, spot, ask each child to dictate a story to me, how I manage this with four or five four year olds while they're sitting there. I don't know, maybe I allowed them to draw and illustrate if I'm starting with A and they were over here at Z and I would let some kids start drawing and I would say tell me your story and then I would turn the pages and write the words and I'd be like okay here now you draw Your whole story that you just told me and I dictated and then I'm taking the next kids and I'm like, okay, you tell me your story, and they're talking over the other three kids that are trying to maybe think about and put paper to pencil, whatever, right?
But it's this contrived situation where I'm Trying to invite them to create their own story, and although there are aspects of it that were child led, [00:27:00] it was, there very much was those moments where one child could very clearly see if another was at the level of Writing just, scribbles versus writing, K.
A. K. A. Over and saying this says, I went to the store with my mom and then seeing and these Children at this age, right? They're starting to develop this awareness of themselves in relation to others. They're starting to develop an awareness of their skills and or skills that they don't yet have.
And just the same way that they might feel like so and so can run faster than me. So and so can write letters and mine don't look like letters, right? And they start to create this, but if we're providing them a space where they can take the paper and the pencils or the markers and write a book on their own and maybe explore.
Whatever mark making and then shove it right into their backpack and you don't even get to see it. Or it goes in the trash or they crumble it. Giving them that freedom to do it without anybody else watching. Without [00:28:00] them having their peers or you watching. Is I think a really valuable thing for them to have that opportunity, right?
And how much in contrast that is to all the kids sitting at the table tracing. The letter K on the worksheet. Yeah. Yeah. And like you said, that's really well intentioned when you set those things up. And I'm a teacher that would have done that years ago. I'm a teacher that for a long time did jump in anytime I saw a child doing something and be like, tell me about that, because I want to get more information and I want to make it look like, this would be a wonderful thing to send home to a parent where they can see that their child's telling a story and I'm writing it down and I'm paying attention.
And I don't do that anymore. I don't do that with storytelling. I don't do that with emergent writing. It is truly child led. And I will have students who will make a story, they'll write a story, they'll do something like that on a daily basis. And I have students who leave my program having never done that.
To my knowledge, anyway, like you say, there's a lot of opportunities where children take You know, paper and they [00:29:00] create something and it just gets crumpled and put in the trash or it goes right into their folder or their backpack and I don't see that at all, but there are students who never engage with me and saying, write down what's happening in my story here and that's okay.
I don't push that. I don't, I just let it unfold because I feel like when it comes from them, it holds up far more meaning and when I'm pushing them to do it. And they will do it, so I don't need to push. I don't need to contrive those opportunities where it's okay, and now it's free this.
So that's something in my own practice that I have evolved in over the years to go from a very teacher directed perspective to a very child led perspective on that. And part of that is, is trusting is trusting that, maybe their strength isn't in emergent writing or orally crafting stories, but they are stellar at riding a two wheel bike at four and different skills are growing at different times and we can still [00:30:00] identify where they are and if their skills are here, and then there's just that little extra barrier that messaging that they're already starting to send themselves if there are these, expectations, these outside societal expectations coming from other places, including, home TV books, like sometimes I look in books where they're talking about Kindergartners or watching shows and they're kindergartners and my child will ask like, how old is that kid?
And then they say that they're five and they're demonstrating, some type of writing or reading skill that my child doesn't have and now it's oh gosh those things are coming from everywhere And so giving them that space where it's really child led and we trust them and we let them trust themselves.
It's so it's so valuable. It's so important I know you told me that recently you started doing maybe something different with storytelling or embracing storytelling that you hadn't before [00:31:00] and that you had a really great experience. I'd love for you to tell us about it and, what it What kind of new learning you walked away with it from?
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like when I first started teaching, I actually started in that special education preschool classroom mid year. So I was coming into a situation where routines had already been established and, I just, I was just going to take over what was happening. I didn't want to disrupt everything.
And. And the way that classroom ran is there was a 30 minute period. I look back on this and I think, whose idea was this? We had 30 minutes, we had an hour of our day where our speech language pathologist would come into our classroom to work on speech and language skills. And 30 minutes of that hour, we were at the carpet doing a story.
It was usually related to our theme. We were very theme based in that classroom. And you would try to pick out a book that you could do, [00:32:00] oh, like pizza, right? And that's one where the little boy, his parents make him into a pizza and they put So we would try and choose a book where then we could bring in a little bit of Oh, everybody gets to take a turn being made into a pizza.
And so we tried to make him interactive. But as a brand new teacher I'm thinking I've got 30 minutes that I have to keep these children engaged and that is an incredibly long time for any three or four or five year old. And then you add in some of the disabilities that we had. I don't, it just was impossible to try and make that story time work.
And so most of the time it was just a read aloud and I would, as the hour started getting, got close to that portion of our day, I would, Try and slow down whatever we were doing so that maybe we could start five minutes late and it was like I was consciously trying to figure out ways to not have to do that part of our day for as long as we had to do it.
And then we would break into small groups and do things, but it was really [00:33:00] hard. And when I moved into this other program later on, it, we, again, it was very theme based and mostly just did read alouds, if we were talking about, and they were often, I have some really funny stories actually about some of the read alouds that we did because the director rarely Read the book beforehand.
And so sometimes we would be reading these books and one of the other teachers would be like have you looked at this book? It has some kind of inappropriate thing at the end. Or some of we had one where it was like animals that were gathering and all of a sudden the book takes this turn and it's oh we're, they're here for the birth of baby Jesus.
And it's that's all fine and good, but we're in a secular setting. And, And so the next year, that same book was put into the rotation, and it just had that page torn out of it. Whatever story was happening, all of a sudden we just had this gap. And it it was a very disjointed, [00:34:00] not very well planned out, the title of the book might've referred to the theme that we were studying, but the contents really didn't mesh quite with what we were talking about.
So they were often just these read alouds and I got to the point where I would even skip those because I did not feel like they were having any sort of impact on the students and it was really more of just trying to get them to sit and be quiet while I read this book that was on the lesson plan for the day.
And this was a school where teachers didn't have any input on the lesson plans. It was interesting. The director did everything and then we just had our supplies in our classroom and we just followed her whole outline. So I just started skipping and we weren't really, we weren't talking about, we weren't learning fairy tales.
We weren't really doing much with storytelling other than here's this book. We're studying community helpers. It's about the mailman. A deal. So I had never really seen storytelling in practice. I had taken my [00:35:00] own kids to the library story times and even in that setting it was mostly just read alouds.
It was not Really what I would call storytelling and last spring, I believe it was last year. I was participating in the the free to play summit. I don't know if you're familiar with yes. Last year she had a whole day of that summit was dedicated to storytelling.
Storytelling. Yeah, I know. People with their different methods. Yes. And that was the first time that I saw storytelling in a whole new light, and I got really excited, and I feel like she usually puts those on in May or something, and so my wheels started to turn for the next school year. We were wrapping up this school year, I'm going to think about this over the summer, and I got a notebook and I just started writing ideas and things that I wanted to incorporate.
For the next school year. But the presentation, the talk that was in that summit that really stood out to me was Sally's, Sally Hoy, who's the founder [00:36:00] of FairyDest, or I think WonderLed is what she calls her business now where she just shared a framework for telling stories. And for me, that was so eye opening to think, here's, I needed a guide, right?
I didn't need to just be told, tell stories. There's so many benefits. I needed to know how to do that. Like I needed instructions. And so she really laid out this framework that I thought, okay, I can do that. And so I decided I was going to do fairy tales because those were familiar to me. So it took the pressure off of having to come up with a story.
It was something that the students, my kids, Not all of them were familiar with fairy tales. I think we shy away from fairy tales these days because they can be a little scary and a little violent and outside of our comfort zone as adults. And yet kids just eat them up. There's so many great things that come from fairy tales.
But I thought I'm going to do fairy tales. So I picked a fairy tale for every month of the school year.
But I was [00:37:00] absolutely blown away that first week that we did this oral portion of, we started with the Three Little Pigs. At how they were just riveted, almost. I, it was like, I almost would want to stop and laugh at, like, how engaged they were. Because I just really didn't think they would be.
I'm like, they're not going to have anything to look at. They're just going to be sitting here and listening. And yet they were, like, they were just really focused on this story. So the first week is tell the story orally. And then week two, we would bring in Some visual components. I think Sally primarily would use like little figurines.
Yeah. She would bring that they could play and, you could act out the little figurines. I adapted that a bit depending on what I could get my hands on. I couldn't always find something for every fairy tale, so sometimes it was a flannel board. Pictures that the kids could put on the flannel board and move them around.
So we would tell the story with pictures. And then [00:38:00] week three, we would bring in books. and we would tell a different book every day. And this was a part where I really found it nice to bring in some of our learning standards. And we focused a lot on what was the same and what was different. So we've been telling this oral story and you've been hearing this for two weeks, but now we've read it in this book.
What was different about it? And they can pick out, sometimes it was just subtleties in if the little flannel board character had on a blue shirt and the one in this book had a green shirt, pick up on that. And it was really fun to see. I was thinking more differences in the way the story is told.
Because fairy tales, depending on how it is shared, are going to have a little bit of variance in them. But they were picking up on all kinds of details. And so we would do that every day. We would talk about what's the same, what's different. Sometimes there would maybe be an extra character that wasn't in a different story that, you know, or a different book that we read.
And so bringing in some of those standards of being able to [00:39:00] categorize different things. And so that was week three and then week four was our story acting where I would then narrate the story. And the students would take parts and sometimes we would have masks. Sometimes they would create their own little costumes.
Sometimes they would choose to just take blocks or something that they wanted to represent the characters and they would act those things out. I would give them a little bit of creative freedom to present that story in the way that they wanted to in their acting. And, I, It was a lot of fun.
They, it seemed every week we would get to the end of the week and they'd be like, Oh, next week we get to add this to our story. And next week we get to add this to our story. And so they really started to catch on to the process, the whole framework. And they would really, culminating that with their own ability to tell the story with their own action.
Even as we got to the end of the year, some of the older kids in the class would ask to be the narrator. [00:40:00] And they might change little details in the story. And sometimes that went over well. And other times, you would have stubborn kids who are like, that's not how it goes. We have to do it this way.
But just to see their own little creativity that they would bring in and, And add to that story because they had seen how that story could change, depending on who was telling it. And yet, the overall essence of the story stayed the same. And, so that three little pigs, that first month, the thing that was really fun to me, we had our framework, and it was a little bit teacher directed and structured, but I started to see that story seep out into other areas of the classroom.
And it started showing up in their play, and we had in our outdoor space, we have a bucket of sticks, and we had just finished a little patio and so I had asked my husband to keep the extra bricks, and he had built them up into a little, like fire pit looking thing. And the kids didn't realize for probably the first three [00:41:00] weeks of school that they could disassemble that and use those bricks.
But once they did, I have a darling video of those kids building a brick house out of those bricks because they had this story in their mind. And then they brought in the sticks, and then they started pulling on my grass because we didn't have straw. And they really started then. Taking that story and having ownership over it and bringing it into their play and taking turns with the different characters.
I would see it in the writing center a little bit. You would have children, some of the older children who would draw the story out. And these were all, this part of it was totally prompted. This was just at playing, they found ways to bring that in. And. That first month or two, I can't even count the number of comments from parents who were like, I've never told this story to my child and she can recite the whole thing to me now.
And so they were really impressed. I think sometimes We don't give [00:42:00] children as much credit as we should, as far as what they're capable of, and so parents who were like, I really didn't think that was a skill that they would have at three years old, and yet she's telling me all of these stories, and by the end of the school year, they had quite a, an arsenal of stories in their back pocket that They could tell at home with their parents, they could tell with their siblings, they could bring into their play.
I had a lot of parents say they would see their children acting out with their toys at home with these stories and so it really started to bleed out into the other areas of their lives and I was converted at that point and I'm, not somebody yet who has ventured into my own storytelling as far as creating my own stories much those fairy tales were really good to get me going But.
It just gave me the confidence that this works, that there is a lot here that we can capitalize on and it doesn't even have to be in a structured, this was something that happened for, 5 to 10 minutes of our [00:43:00] day that we have a structured portion. It doesn't even have to be that.
It can be a lot more organic. There's a lot of ways to do it, but just being able to bring that in and seeing how well it worked and the credit that I didn't give the kids at the beginning of the year when I thought these oral stories, they are not going to be paid attention at all. And they did and it was like, okay, I'm, I believe now.
And so now we're going to add this next component and just seeing, being able to layer and see the depth that came from that was really exciting for me. And it made me excited to now think about this coming school year and how I'm going to do that. I have a lot of kids who are coming back for a second year, so I've got to change it up a little bit with the stories that I tell and how that's going to look to keep it fresh and new for them.
So it was a really great experience that's so exciting. I think what I heard you saying was you needed that bridge. You needed something to nudge you and help you ground yourself. And it sounds like this [00:44:00] framework. It's like a almost, a tutorial telling you what to do with something as free as storytelling was helpful and that's exactly it.
And now you can start to build it into your repertoire and you get to build upon it and how fun if you stay with the same, nine stories and you have some of those children that are returning how differently now they can. Participate in this storytelling adventure as knowing the story and it not being a new story to them and how many more additional layers you can bring to it or what responsibilities and or roles you can start to pass off to them, right?
They're not going to wait until spring to want to be the narrators. They're going to want to be the narrators right away. I think that's a great point. Yeah, and the thing that really stuck out to me, if you don't know this book yet, and you don't know Dr. Stephanie Galway, this book, do you know Happily Ever Resilient?
I have not read it yet, but I am familiar with it, yeah. She's in this, sweet spot of embracing [00:45:00] and using storytelling and story acting like a la Vivian Paley and also did her whole big thesis and dissertation and research on the resiliency and how and why we should use story fairy tales because of all these protective features that they have in them and why children are so drawn to them and so actually if that like little bit of a framework was helpful for you this book is great because she has those that kind of in there she will she'll say like you can do this story of cinderella right and give you some variants and versions to consider as well as other texts or stories that you can tell and then gives you know some ways that you can build it Or materials or invitations that you can offer into your classroom, like maybe you're going to invite potion making or playing and pretending doing magic or parts of it that you can build in the block area or stem that relate to aspects of [00:46:00] Cinderella and it gives this little bit of a.
I don't know, something more tangible, I found, was so helpful, and so when you were first started saying that, I also, that's how she and I first started our dialogue through the interwebs, was I was saying Maybe shift this language in this, if you're telling this storytale, and she was like maybe you don't shift this fairytale language, and you leave, the, yeah. Hansel and Gretel getting eaten because of this reason and just pushed back on why and had me really think more about why did I feel that discomfort. And yeah I tell stories about bears eating humans and then vomiting them up that I make up. So why can't there be a story about a witch that, traps two kids and scares them to death?
I don't know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for somebody like me, who's fairly new to storytelling, it is really helpful to be able to have something tangible to be able to look at and feel like, okay, that makes sense. It gives you a little bit of a springboard to then work on, and then you can craft it into [00:47:00] your own thing and what works for you and your students in your classroom.
Yeah, that's one that I've had on my list for a while. I just have not ordered it. So you've prompted me now to get that one in my bookshelf. Yeah, for sure. Definitely. Because, we, in the same way that maybe you want to paint, right? And there, how many paint classes are there? Now for T for adults, right?
And you do the paint and sip and paint because people want to be able to do some things that are creative, but we are don't feel so creative, right? We need somebody up there telling us what to do sometimes. And you know why? Because we all did worksheets as children. So that's true. That is true. Yes, but once you start going to a few paint nights and you learn some of those techniques and those brush strokes, and now you know how to layer and blend.
Now, maybe you don't go to the paint night and you just find the materials yourself and you feel more comfortable and confident being creative with a blank canvas, but throw a blank canvas [00:48:00] or an empty stage in front of most adults and say, go do improv or go, dance or go create a piece of artwork.
We freeze. In the same way that we might, if we say, tell me a story. And so having somebody break it down a little bit more, make it a little bit more easy, give us those accommodations to find an entry point for us. And then you feel more comfortable and then you can get more creative. I feel like that's probably one of the reasons that we tend to fall back on books so frequently is because it's all right there for us. We don't have to think far ahead. The pictures are there. We don't have to create the imagery with our words, it's all just given to us. And so I think that's probably one of the reasons that storytelling didn't come to me as.
Any earlier is because I didn't see anybody else doing it and I needed that model to be able to say, okay, that I can see now how that [00:49:00] works. Absolutely. Absolutely. And sometimes it's okay to grab the book, right? Because sometimes we're just fried and exhausted. And, now, there's always a place for both.
And now you know The Three Little Pigs so well and I'm sure you can tell it in different ways that you can just tell that story and you don't have to grab the book that's next to you because you have that. And I think yeah, I agree that even when you go to the library now and it's story hour, the librarians are not telling stories, they're reading books.
And the, the storytelling is we don't see it as much. We don't see people modeling it with young children. I'm thrilled to hear that you're doing it and that you fell in love with it and saw the power of it and are already thinking about how you're going to be building upon it.
As you have a new group of children that are joining you. And I think that there's really beautiful ways to take the oral storytelling that you're doing and weaving it right in with. The books that they can write and emergent writing and so many [00:50:00] just authentic natural ways that they tie together.
So that's really beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. I loved this chat. It was really great chatting with you. Is there any last words you want to leave us with? Where can people find you and learn more from you? You have so much to share. I know beyond emergent literacy and writing. Where can people find you?
Yeah, so on Instagram, I, Play Before Pencils is my handle, there's an underscore between each, under, between each of the words, and I share there, I, honestly, it's one of the balls that I drop quite frequently when I'm juggling all of the things that I have going on. At times I'm posting more and at times I'm posting less, but you can find me there.
My website is PlayBeforePencils. com and I have a few resources there as well. And I also have a podcast called Play Before Pencils that just focuses really on play in the classroom and child led learning. And you can hop on and listen to that anytime. Beautiful. Yeah, those are all great resources that you offer free and [00:51:00] people should definitely dive in.
And like I said, that's how I came across you and just seeing some of the thoughts that you were sharing. And it just gave me that little it's nice to find that community and that affirmation that the work that we're doing, others are doing as well. And they're small, microwaves that we are, and the more that we can keep, spreading all the play, spreading all the love of following the lead of the children the So I'll drop all those.
And I'm sure we'll be talking again. Yes. Thanks for having me on your podcast. I appreciate it.
The end. But really, that's it for today's episode of Stories That Stick. Inspiring and captivating minds, young and old. Remember, stories have the incredible ability to spark conversations, ignite imagination, and create lasting connections. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a five star review.
It really does make a difference. And, if you have a story to share or a topic you want me to explore, reach [00:52:00] out to me on Instagram at LittleStoriesThatStick. Until next time, keep working that storytelling muscle and tell stories every day.
