The Common Course Blog of Gira Mundo Finlândia Paraíba -programme. The goal of the blog is to demonstrate competences and collaborative learning processes of the study groups during the Finnish study section in 2016. The programme continues in Brazil. | Häme University of Applied Sciences, School of Professional Teacher Education, Finland CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Storytelling - a few tips to tell stories and capture students attention

Storytelling may sound an easy task for many teachers. However, for some reasons others try not to tell them in class for many different reasons. One thing which requires for any storyteller is definitely time to prepare the story – if you have read or heard the story before then it may become easier. On the other hand, if you have never heard of it, you need to take time to read it a few times until you are confident enough to tell it by heart. Take also some time to prepare yourself for what you want to say and how you want to say it. It means verifying details and gathering information that will be crucial for your story, such as dates or descriptions of one place, one character, anedoctes and most importantly, body language. 

Make sure your story includes some action, characters somehow close to the audience reality, emotion and one big event. By this big event, we tend to believe that a story must have only one big event – otherwise it will be too long and somehow may lose its purpose. One story which shows only the protagonist may sound boring – s/he needs to pursue some adventure, justice, love or triumph. One or these feelings makes the story more interesting. It is on the storyteller hands though to focus on the activity of storytelling and its drama, keeping the audience engaged and interested.

Your story must fit the audience – what we mean by that is in case you are telling for a group of kids aged 5-6 you will avoid using refined vocabulary – keep it short and simple, always looking them in the eye, modulating the tone of your voice when one character is about to say something, facial expressions can vary according to the scene being described as well as having short pauses to collect some feedback, to verify if your audience is really paying attention to the story being told.
If you tell your story too slowly, the audience will lose interest. But if you do the opposite, they might not follow all the steps. Make sure you find a balance to tell your story in a pace your audience will find it pleased to hear.
Do not be afraid of making mistakes or forgetting some detail while you are tellling – it takes time to get used to it and improvising is also a good solution for storytellers.
Make sure you have a solid beginning, middle and end – it will help you remember the most important parts in a story and control pacing.


Last, but not least advice could be: make your story visual – you can use some elements which can become your story more realistic – by that we mean, in case you are telling a story about a king, you can have a crown of a king or maybe if you tellling a story of a cloud if you can use cotton to symbolize it. Again, during this phase of preparation and selecting the elements of your story it is important to pick a few and simple elements, otherwise your audience may lose interest in your story and will give more attention to the elements presented.


Photos conceeded by Dany Danielle - storyteller who lives in João Pessoa

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