This week we had some really interesting classes, but one of them was more interesting than others for me, it was a class in which we were talking about storytelling. In that class we were discussing about some characteristic that a good storyteller should keep in mind, like for example the use of onomatopoeias or the mimic and gestures while speaking to make the story easier to understand for some students than maybe can’t understand every word of the story.
And it was a great surprise for me when Raquel (our teacher) decided to show us some examples of a good storytelling.
We saw a video of an English storyteller named Michael Rosen about a chocolate cake, it was one of the most exciting stories I ever heard but not because of the story, which is interesting, but because of the way of speaking and representing of the author, he makes the story really funny and interesting, he creates the story in a way in which he is the main character and represent it in a really exaggerated way with a lot of gestures, mimic, screaming and noises in the story.
It surprised me to the point that I decidedto look for more stories and I found more stories about a watch, washing up and others shorter ones.
The topic was really interesting so I decided that I should show the story to some of my friends that has not a good level of English and check if they understood the story, and as I thought they got the whole idea of what is Michael Rosen talking about, not because of the words (they understood some of them) but because of the whole context of the video.
The class after that we returned to some videos of this brilliant novelist, but this time we were not only listening, but we were telling the story with the author, the first time we just listened to the story and the second one we represented the whole story with the help of the video at the same time. It was great, firstly I felt a little bit embarrassed but then I realized this is something really fantastic to learn because, in some way or another, all of us will work with children, and sometimes we will tell them some stories, I would like my stories would be as interesting as Michael Rosen’s ones.
Chocolate Cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeS6U_OcE4
Michael Rosen’s website: http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/
I love the idea of showing your friends the video to see if it was possible that they might understand the story without a large level of English. This shows that this method of telling things (with exaggerated gestures, mime and voice) help our students (when we are using a non-mother tongue language) to understand our words without understanding everything we say (for only the context andwhat I said above). Also surprised me pleasantly on these activity that, being already fairly “adult”, I was feeingl like the child of the story (which in truth is Michael Rosen) wanting that chocolate cake, going to get it to the kitchen (with nerves if they discovered us going down stairs, eat the chocolate cake, and at the end be discovered!I have a good time but may be because I also love the chocolate cake!
I totally agree with you Krzysztof. I am sure there were a lot of us who already knew that telling stories was a very important issue to deal with children. However, I would say that Michael Rosen made us reflect about the way of telling them. His expressivity engage people a lot in the story and the same happen with all of us.
Definitely, it happened the same to me. I was totally amazed by the way the different scenes were taken place along the story. If adult people can enjoy the story in this way I could not imagine how children would get involved in it and feel as the main character.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggcBm8CX0oM
Before deciding the topic of my first post, I wanted to talk about Michael Rosen. I considered him as an indispensable topic to comment on. For that reason, I thought about commenting your post. I found on the internet a video, which is a bit long, in which Michael Rosen is in front of a huge amount of children involving them in the story. In this case, he is representing the story called “Bear Hunt” which really I was delighted about. And here it is completely evident how children enjoy it and feel part of the whole story.