How To Tell Stories To Children

Description

Let Sara Cone Bryant, beloved children’s author from the early 20th century, take you back to that time when the family hearth was the entertainment center, and each night the voice of Mom, Dad, or big sister was a guide to mystery, adventure, and delight.

Better yet, let Sara Cone Bryant teach you how to recapture the pleasures of that simpler age by introducing your family to the joys of stories told, which, she demonstrates, are more delightful to children — and better for them — even than stories read aloud.

In How to Tell Stories to Children, Bryant explains the key do’s and don’ts of selecting, adapting, and voicing stories for your childrens’ maximum enjoyment and edification.

She teaches you why some stories specially lend themselves to telling aloud, and how to recognize them, as well as how to incorporate into your own stories elements that are sure to grab and hold children’s attention.

Finally, she shows you not only how to tell stories, but to tell stories to your kids: for all good storytellers know how to take the words of a tale and adapt them, modifying their length, language, and content to fit the audience or occasion.

Soon, you, too, will be a master of the art of storytelling.

And the bored, fidgeting kids who now so often interrupt your read-aloud stories will be silent, enthralled listeners, begging you at the end of each story, “Please, Momma, tell one more! Just one more!”

Chapters include:

The Purpose of Storytelling in Education
How to Select Stories to Tell
Adapting Stories for Telling
How to Tell a Story
Storytelling in the Classroom
Plus:

How to Tell Stories to Children includes over 200 pages of the author’s favorite and most “tellable” short stories and poems, giving you in one volume everything you need to begin practicing right away the rare and valuable art of storytelling!

Among them you’ll find the following stories and poems, specially adapted for telling out loud by Sara Cone Bryant herself:

Kindergarten:
Wee Willie Winkie • There Was a Crooked Man • Cushy Cow Bonny • Little Girl, Little Girl, Where Have You Been? • Little Bo Peep • Five Little White Heads • Bird Thoughts • How We Came to Have Pink Roses • Raggylug • The Golden Cobwebs • Why the Morning Glory Climbs • The Story of Little Tavwots • The Pig Brother • The Cake • The Pied Piper of Hamelin Town • Why Evergreen Trees Keep Their Leaves in Winter • The Star Dollars • The Lion and the Gnat
Grades 2 and 3:
The Cat and the Parrot • The Rat Princess • The Frog and the Ox • The Fire-Bringer • The Burning of the Rice Fields • The Story of Wylie • Little Daylight • The Sailor Man • The Story of Jairus’s Daughter
Grades 4 and 5:
Arthur and the Sword • Tarpeia • The Buckwheat • The Judgment of Midas • Why the Sea Is Salt • Billy Beg and His Bull • The Little Hero of Haarlem • The Last Lesson • The Story of Christmas • The Nurnberg Stove • The King of the Golden River