Podcasts, Storytelling and Some Things that Never Change

Podcasts

Yesterday, the Pigs and I worked on podcasts.  Turns out podcasts are like stories on CD, only you make them yourself, on your laptop.

We started with the Mayan folktales linked in the Digital Parking Lot.  I read them out loud straight off the website, and each Pig chose one.  We talked about what changes we thought would make them better as oral tales, then I rewrote them.

Then Guinea Pig #2 narrated the stories into GarageBand, a program which evidently came installed on my Mac (ya see, I am starting to avail of a fuller range of its capabilities) through the built-in microphone.  We added some jungle sounds straight off the Mac; and we're good to go:

[well, evidently I'm not good to go, when it comes to uploading the files.  They appear to be in m4a format, and that evidently is not the format that Blogger prefers.  I expect Jennifer has some sort of magic wand that can be waved...  

post script: well, no, having read Blogger's helpful Help article, it appears that I need a place on the web on which the podcasts sit -- Blogger doesn't itself hold audio files.  Well, believe me, if I could figure out how to put the %4#@! things up on my *&$75%1! WEB SITE I'd have gone there first.  Someday.  Soon.  But trust me, the podcasts themselves are... terrific]

I'm a big time believer in audio stories and audio books.  They enable kids to "own" stories years before they can read; and even once they can, they can listen to books at higher reading levels than they're at.  Audio books build vocabulary, visualization capabilities, aural comprehension, and attention span.  Listening together in the car is a shared pleasure (one year, my son and I listened to the entire unabridged Hobbit and Lord of the Rings on the way back and forth to his school.  Over a hundred hours all in.  It went a whole lot faster.)

Podcasts allow you to make your own audio stories, without much hassle.  The Pigs and I selected, rewrote, and recorded these three in one afternoon; once I worked out how to use GarageBand I did another one with my mother in less than an hour.  Guinea Pig #2 was particularly taken with the project; he has significant language related disabilities (and also, perhaps because of them, particularly loves to listen to stories on CD).  I was able to put the ones he recorded on his iPod, again without undue difficulty.

Two thumbs up.

Storytelling

Much of the reason that podcasting was such an easy sell for the whole extended family is that the technology is such a direct and natural fit with storytelling.  And storytelling is a pretty big deal around here.  We read stories, we listen to stories on CD (and more recently, on iPod), we talk about stories, we tell stories to each other, the kids tell stories to us.

In Pig #1's Quaker school, they do a storytelling unit every fall.  Each kid, from second grade on up, selects a story and memorizes its "bones."  They practice telling, shaping, pacing, emoting.  Lat year the redoubtable Jim Weiss came and did a day-long workshop with them.  The unit culminates with Storytelling Night, in which all the kids' families come and watch them.

It's extraordinary to see what they can do.

Some Things that Never Change

 

We happen to be at my parents' house for the weekend, and as I began my re-write of the Mayan stories above, Guinea Pig #1 disappeared for a moment, then came back bearing this book:

It's entitled How to Tell Stories to Children, by Sara Cone Bryant.  I didn't provide my usual link to Amazon, because it was published in... 

1905.  

Here's the flyleaf:

Mary Jane Stewart Bates, of the beautiful handwriting so typical of her day, is not a member of my family, on any side.

The dedication of the book is this:

... which actually made me tear up, a little bit.

And it got me onto an extended backstory-telling of my own, of who the author was, who the author's mother was, who Mary Jane Stewart Bates was, and how this book made its way to my mother's house.  

Where, it turns out, my own daughter spied it on the shelves, several years ago, and read it, cover to cover.  Because, you know, she tells stories herself, to her siblings at home and to the larger audience at Storytelling Night.

"It's worth reading, Mom," she said earnestly.  "There's a lot of good stuff in there."  (The apple clearly doesn't fall very far from the tree.)

And she's right.  (She usually is.)

Here's the Table of Contents:

As is clear from the table of contents, the fundamentals of storytelling haven't changed much in the last 103 years.  Or the last 1,003 either, for that matter.  

She says a lot about internalizing the story, knowing it in your bones, making it your own and telling it from your own soul.  She talks, too, about pacing and voice.  About choosing your story based on your audience.  A lot of the same stuff that Jim Weiss talked about, in my daughter's school.

But more fundamentally, she makes perfectly clear what stories are for.  On page 3 she states clearly that although stories are often vehicles for conveying moral messages, or life lessons, or information about one subject or another, "its part in the economy of life is to give joy... To give joy, in and through the joy to stir and feed the life of the spirit: is not this the legitimate function of the story in education?"  

Quite so.