Storytelling at Ancient House

Yup, Ancient House events two days in a row.

Today's event was International Story Day. Each person was telling stories from a different part of the world. I opted to tell stories from America. I knew that this event would be a little bit of a challenge for me, because I am one of those people who really feeds off the energy of the audience and because of the nature of the event there was pretty much no chance of my having a large audience at any given time.

The first young man who wandered into my room actually turned out to be the most difficult. I asked him before I began my story if he was willing to participate. He said "yes." So I proceeded headlong into "The Foolish Frog" only to find that he was willing to participate, but not to sing. I, of all people, can't blame him for that, but I did feel a little awkward carrying on by myself.

After that I asked children if they were willing to participate, AND if they were willing to sing. (I did prepare more than one story, after all. No point telling one that didn't suite the audience.) The other children who came all had siblings, and I think that made them braver. I got plenty of singers and told "The Foolish Frog" a few more times with much better results. One girl actually said aloud during the story, "This is too funny!"

At the very end two boys who looked like they were school age came in and so I decided to try out my "older" story on them. It's called "How Jack Came to America" and I got it from a collection of Jack stories by Donald Davis. I planned to introduce the story by talking about how we have Jack stories in the part of the world I come from and also over here in England and why do you think that is? I thought the children might realize that people who moved from England brought Jack with them. But that is not the answer I got. I got, "Jack is a pretty common name." If you haven't told your audience what to say, you really have no idea what kind of response you are going to get.

All the kids who came in were really great listeners and were a pleasure to tell stories to. And as long as the audience is made up of listeners, it doesn't really matter how many of them there are.