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3/22/2001 12:07:00 AM It's story time!Center for Education program introduces preschoolers to
printed word through storytelling project BY MARGOT DIMOND Five-year-old Rachel Hamburger has a story to tell. She carefully dictates it one word at a time, watching with fascination as her teacher writes it down. In a few minutes, Rachel will identify her characters and assign various classmates to play roles in a production of her story, which she has entitled “A Trip to the Zoo.” Later, Rachel becomes the director of the production, deciding who will stand where and how everything will proceed. Her teacher, Olga Antonetti, makes the experience as dramatic as possible, using a camera slate to start the action and naming the actors who play the characters at the end, as each child takes a bow. Rachel, a student at Garden Oaks Elementary School, is in a preschool class that participates in the Classroom Storytelling Project, a mentoring program for early childhood teachers in the use of storytelling to help children learn the power of the printed word. It is one of several professional development projects offered by Rice University’s Center for Education. Classroom storytelling is based on the groundbreaking work of Vivian Paley, a MacArthur Fellow and Chicago kindergarten teacher who pioneered stories with children. The Center for Education expanded on Paley’s work to create a professional development program for teachers grounded in theories of language learning and child development. The center began its program in 1991 and has enrolled more than 400 teachers in preschool and primary classrooms in the Aldine, Alief, Fort Bend and Houston school districts, as well as in private schools and Head Start programs. “Success in school, especially in the language arts, is determined by the third grade,” says Bernie Mathes, director of the center’s School Literacy and Culture Project. “But school success can be a challenge for minority and disadvantaged children, where the school culture is different from the home culture. Classroom storytelling encourages children to bring stories of their home life to school, to dramatize and share them.” The teacher lays the groundwork by reading adult-authored stories and rhymes, and then showing the children how to dramatize them. Once children are comfortable with this process, they begin dictating their own stories to the teacher, who writes them down. Finally, the children act out their stories with the help of their classmates. Teachers say children in a storytelling classroom develop confidence and a love of stories, which leads to a desire to read and write. In fact, they say, a child’s own stories are often the first that he will read independently. Teachers also learn about the children — what they enjoy, fear, care about, are trying to understand and more. “When teachers know their students better, they can do a better job of teaching them,” explains Mathes. Teachers receive on-site mentoring every other week, attend monthly seminars, visit model classrooms and participate in a weeklong summer institute on reading and writing. At a recent seminar, 14 teachers of children two to nine years of age met to share what has been happening in their classrooms. When Margaret Immel, the center’s associate director for literacy, encouraged the teachers to share stories, one teacher told of two 4-year-old girls in her class who “wrote” an excuse note to get out of school. Such attempts at writing, often a combination of English words and symbols by very young children who don’t know all of their letters and words yet, are a very common result of the program, Immel says. “Children start to notice people writing — like at the doctor’s office. They become aware of print and its importance in life.” Judy Rolke is a mentor teacher who initially used storytelling in 1993 as a kindergarten teacher in Alief’s Chancellor Elementary School. She says the program not only builds literacy skills, but social skills as well. She recalls one little boy who came to her class with no English. Then one day a few months after school had started, he came up to her and proudly announced, “I have four characters in my story.” “English development in English as a Second Language classes is phenomenal with this program,” Rolke says. She explains that children really are motivated to develop their vocabulary, since they are trying so hard to communicate with an audience. Karen Capo agrees. Now a mentor teacher, she was one of the first teachers to use the program, beginning in 1991. “There is emotional import to the child. He is telling you something that’s important to him, and he will struggle to find the words to communicate to others,” she says. Capo has a personal interest in the program. Her son Jonathan, now in the first grade, began telling stories as a shy preschooler. “This was his entry into all things social. Through stories, he has developed a love of writing. We dramatize the stories at home. That’s something we hear from a lot of our parents.” In storytelling, Immel says, “there is no prerequisite for being successful. If you can communicate, you have an opportunity for success. There’s a level playing field for being a storyteller and an actor.” Antonetti, who is in her first year with the program, already is enthusiastic. “It’s wonderful,” she says. “It allows you to develop a very close relationship with the kids. When they are telling me a story, they know they have all my attention. They also know that I’ll be writing it down, so they have ownership, and that it stays in a class book, so it has some permanence.” “The Classroom Storytelling Project shows that our national goal of having all children be readers is not unattainable,” says Mathes. “A good way to begin is to connect children to the power of words and story.” Funding for the Classroom Storytelling Project has been provided in part by the Brown Foundation, the Powell Foundation, the Clayton Fund and the schools served by the program. For more information visit the Center for Education Web site at <www.ruf.rice.edu/~ctreduc/>. |
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