Storytelling Activities and Lesson Plans

Reviewed By Laura Boston

http://www.storyarts.org/lessonplans/lessonideas/index.html

Heather Forrest, author and storyteller, sponsors this web site. The site lists 20 activities with short descriptions of each activity. The activities can be used to stimulate speaking, writing, listening or reading activities.

This is a great web site for teachers. A link is available for lesson plans; there one finds handouts and very specific instructions for implementation for most of the activities. There are a few activities with no lesson plans listed. The ideas listed provide an alternative method to cover required material in a very different format. It is more stimulating for students to write a story from their own imagination rather than to write those TAAS prompts. As we move toward TAKS, it is more important that students be capable writers of several genres.

<b>Examples of Activities:</b> Three of my favorite activities were “plot structure scenarios, an autobiography of anything, and a picture is worth 1000 words.” These three activities are easily adaptable to a variety of age groups and work well for readers and non-readers. The “plot structure scenarios” involves a check list of character, place setting, time period, problem, inner trait that caused the problem and inner trait that will solve the problem, solution, conclusion and end. Students randomly pick one of each of the elements and then create a story. The story can be oral or written.

In the “autobiography of anything activity,” students make up a story about a specific object, a hat a glove or any other object.

Another great activity was the “picture is worth 1000 words.” Students in a class view a famous artwork and write one paragraph about the “story” of the art piece. The art piece and the start of the story are then passed along to another class and the next class adds to the story and passes it along to another class. At the end of the cycle, all the classes meet and read the story.

There were may links on the site, thirty-five were tried and all worked. The links included lesson plans from various places, concise story lines for old tales, copies of many versions of old favorite tales, native American sites, a site discussing the problems with telling tales from other cultures and many more. This site has such a wealth of links that it is hard to move to another site.

<b>Contact Information and Copyright:</B> The site has contact information with the mailing address, phone number and e-mail of Heather Forrest. The site has a copyright of 2000, but there is no indication of when the site was most recently updated. The art work on the site give a feel of an art site not an information site, yet there was a broad range and depth of information offered on the site.