Supporting Children as Story Makers
We began the project by using music as an initial provocation. We cleared the classroom so that the children were free to move and offered open ended resources such as fabric, scarves and ribbons. The children responded by embodying their ideas and transforming themselves into familiar characters or creatures.
We noted that the children particularly loved the experience of linking their ideas together as a whole group into simple narratives and stories. They wanted to repeat the narratives and were eager to try out each other’s ideas. This was happening spontaneously between individual children but required adult intervention for a larger group of children.
As the project developed, we explored ways in which we as adults could support the children in the process of creating their stories. One of the most important aspects of this was to help the children perceive themselves as story makers and authors.
