Residencies

Leah employs storytelling techniques to improve student writing. In her residencies, she works with students in groups and individually to help them envision, plot out, and re-vision stories before they even begin the composition process. This engages students in the act of developing details, structure, and suspense before they even begin the task of paragraphing and editing. After you've taken a look at the residencies below, see what teachers and students are saying about the success of this method!

Residencies

Funnier Than Fiction: Your Life as Story

Subversive Storytelling

Funnier Than Fiction! Your Life as Story

Grades 3 – 6

This workshop is designed to help students take the experiences of their lives and turn them into memorable and entertaining stories. The emphasis is on pre-writing strategies and involves several separate tasks. Exercises will include the following:

REMEMBERING

	A magical memory tour. Students will create a floor plan of an early childhood home and take another student on a memory tour – not of furniture, but of sounds, smells, feelings, people, and experiences. Memory is stored in sensation.
	“Baited Hooks” for finding story memories: Every story is about trouble, a time when we expected the world to go one way and it surprised us. “Baited hooks” help students remember important events they have lived to tell about and the people who helped them do it.

CREATING

Creating a “telling board:” Once students discover the memory they most want to develop into a story, they will create pictures to help them order the events into story form.

Oral Story Coaching: Telling the story aloud provides the teller with instant feedback for editing. Is it a story yet? Together, we discover the story that wants to be told, what to add and what to leave out. The trick here to so make sure we have introduced the people and the places before the action starts. Showing the learning that resulted from the experience of trouble is the final knot at the end.

DOCUMENTING

	Transposing the orally composed pictures to the page: The challenge now is to make sure we paint the pictures with words so the reader can see them.
	Fattening up the text: The final task is to fatten up the story with delicious dialog, description, detail, and vivid language.
	Story Celebration! Students will present their stories during a final Story Celebration and receive their own anthology to treasure.

Subversive Storytelling
Or Little Red: An Investigation

Grades 2 - 5

The storyteller is in many respects like the big “bad” wolf, a rabble rouser whose stories are meant to incite, not to destroy, to provoke thought and curiosity; to point a way toward creating a network within a community that brings people together around the concerns they have for the future of their children.”
--Jack Zipes, Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives

Do you know the story of Little Red Riding Hood? Do you know the version where the woodsman doesn’t save the day and she and her grandmother are both eaten by the wolf?

	Did she get what she deserved for talking to strangers and straying from the path?
	Was it fair?
	Are victims responsible for the violence?
	Should girls be treated differently than boys?

Do you know the (oral) version of the story where the little girl outwits the wolf and escapes?

Which is the real story?

After hearing both stories and asking questions of them, students will have the opportunity to

Act out the stories.
Choose a favorite scene, write about it and illustrate it.
Play “What if? (What if Little Red knew magic and could transform the wolf into another character? What if Little Red were a boy? What if Little Red knew Superman, or had a black belt in karate? Etc.)
Write an original story and illustrate it.
Read other versions of Little Red.

This workshop encourages meaningful character education while also teaching ELA Standards 1 – 4, and The Arts Standards 1 & 2.