It’s story time!

It’s
story time!

Center for Education program introduces preschoolers to
printed word through storytelling project
…………………………………………………………………

BY MARGOT DIMOND
Rice News Staff

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/>.