April 27th is National Tell A Story Day. This unique holiday is celebrated by storytelling, reading as a family and by creating your own stories. With families at home, now is the perfect time to be sharing stories, especially those that elder members of your family might tell about your family’s past or culture.
Here are some simple ways you can work on your storytelling skills:
Read a favorite or new book!
Call a relative on FaceTime or Zoom and ask them to share a story about their childhood.
Have a performance in your home. Have everyone tell a 2 minute story and give out awards for creativity, dramatic flair or
With very young children, use storytelling to narrate your everyday actions: “I use these keys to turn my car on and drive to the store.”
Use the resources below to learn more about public forums for storytelling.
Storycorps is a nonprofit recording organization that catalogs stories and interviews between people and archives them in Library of Congress. Storycorps’ “mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” They have created a new online recording tool for families to document their stories from home: https://storycorps.org/participate/storycorps-connect/
Even though The International Storytelling Center’s physical location is currently closed, usually the Tennessee address makes visiting this museum challenging for Rhode Island residents. Working to “celebrate and protect oral traditions from around the world at the levels of individuals and families, communities, and regions, as well as shared cultural heritage,” the ISC offers countless online resources to provide you with ideas about storytelling: https://www.storytellingcenter.net/initiatives/learning-library/
Visit medium.com to read an article about storytelling from the folks at Pixar Studios, the team that created the movies Up, Brave and Inside Out: https://medium.com/@Brian_G_Peters/6-rules-of-great-storytelling-as-told-by-pixar-fcc6ae225f50
No matter how you tell or share a story, spending time together as a family and learning more about your culture or family history is a wonderful way to make use of time at home together.
