In my last article, Revisiting Imaginative Play, I looked at ways of revitalising the ‘role-play’ area. In this article I want to explain how intervention with a few children in a role-play area can be developed into working in this way with a whole class. The phrase ‘role-play' is a problematic term. It is often used to describe what children are doing in ‘pretend play’ However, it has inconsistencies and individualised understandings that make it tricky. In the theatrical sense the actor who is in ‘role’ has to take on board all the characteristics of the character they are playing. They need to know about a character’s past history, emotions and relationships with others. When young children engage in ‘role-play’ they play ‘themselves’ being a doctor, nurse, shopkeeper etc. They take on the generic nature of a ‘role’ as they are not able at this stage to play a fully rounded character. I prefer to describe young children who are engaged in ‘fantasy play’ as using their ‘pretend-self’. We are not asking them to ‘act’. Interactive Story-Making Sessions Interactive stories use both dialogue and non-verbal action, which are constructed as the story line develops. The talk and action are very similar to those found in reality, but they are taking place in a fictional world. There is no pre-written script and the children do not mime to narration to move the story forward (Children miming the Three Bears while you read the story, has little artistic or educational value). Your role as teacher in this fiction is to manage and evaluate the dialogue and action in order to exploit the learning potential and explore areas such as emotional and moral matters alongside other aspects of the curriculum. Interactive story-making helps to provide a context for communication, language and literacy. When engaging children in ‘interactive story-making’ you can give particular attention to: providing opportunities for children to communicate thoughts, ideas and feelings and build up relationships with adults and each other. give opportunities for linking language with physical movement. providing time and opportunities to develop spoken language through conversations between children and adults, both one-one, in small groups and as a whole class. Making the Contract Before working with the whole class it is important that you lay down some ground rules. You must make a contract with the children that you are all going to make a story together. For some children there is a fine line between their imaginative worlds and their perception of reality. You may feel you want the story to be immediate and spontaneous so you put on a bonnet and go into role as Mrs. Tigglewinkle. Nothing destroys spontaneity quicker than confusion. If the children have not been warned or asked whether they want to join your game, they become perplexed and often frightened because they do not know what is happening. An interactive story belongs to the children not to the adults. It is very important that the children make a choice about joining the story. When I work in this way for the first time with a class of children I do not know, I often talk about stories and the sort of things that happen in stories. I will ask them to help me make up a story that nobody has ever told before. After the initial session they know exactly what is going to happen and will often ask you when they can make a new story or finish an old one. But even then it is important that children and adults are always aware that they are playing make-believe and that the story can stop. Defining the space. You need to define the space in which the story takes place. If I am working in a school hall I place mats or benches to define a rectangle and tell the children the story only takes place inside the special story space. In a classroom you only need to move a few tables to create your space. The space does not have to be big but a special area helps to keep children interested and aids the adult with control. You do not want them crawling under the tables or climbing the wall bars! Using props and costumes I would not use props and costumes in the early stages of developing this activity. I think they can become a great distraction. Some practitioners use gloves or a hat to great advantage. But until children are very familiar with this form of activity, I ask the children to rely on their imaginations. I work on the principle that I cannot bring a forest into the story space so I would rather that everything we use in the story is imaginary as well. If you start to use real objects to early then you are open to children using rulers for swords and L-shaped bricks as guns. I suggest you keep the costumes and props for the role-play area until children are entirely accustomed to what they are expected to do and even at that stage I would use costumes and props very sparingly. Working with other adults When you first begin using interactive story-making, it is a good idea to involve other adults, either TAs, LSAs or parents. In one school where I went regularly to do ‘interactive story-making’ with each class, I had a group of very enthusiastic parents who came and joined in. They became so engrossed in the stories that they would be very upset if some reason they were unable to come. As the stories often lasted for more than one session, being absent for a week meant missing some vital development. One story, about finding a lost princess, lasted for a whole term! You need to induct other adults into the rules of the game but you must keep overall control. All the ideas should be relayed to you and for you to feed to the rest of the group. Adults must be prepared to be in a lower status role than the children. The children should as much as possible be in the role of the ‘expert’. I do not tell them what to do; I ask them what is happening or discuss with them the choices they have made. If I am hurt I cry, if I am frightened I ask someone to protect me. It is not my job to tell the story or make any of the decisions. I can suggest an alternative but I must never insist on this being the course everyone takes. It is my job to probe, to ask and to question. If all the adults are working in this way then the children are challenged and tested. Planning the entry point Find a context that will give children a powerful dilemma and will provide tension and suspense. Children need to know where they are, who they are and what they are doing at the beginning of the story. Children have a strong instinct for ‘classic story’ structure. They understand that all good stories begin with an exposition or setting out the context of a story. This is followed by an opening complication or the first moment of tension in a story. The story progresses through a sequence of complications until it reaches a ‘climax’. The story is sorted out during the resolution where ‘everybody lives happily ever after’ or not. It has always been my experience that a child in the class will create the first complication. It may take ten minutes or more but if you can bear to wait, it always arrives– the moment the story takes off. By getting impatient and creating the first complication yourself the children lose interest as it then becomes the adult’s story not their own. As the story progresses children will face problem solving and decision-making and, with the adults to help them, they will make the story progress through different complications. The story will reach some kind of climax before it finishes. Some stories move very fast and the adults have the responsibility to keep some focus on the storyline. Young children are keen ‘plot guzzlers’ in their early experiments with interactive story-making. Very young children need to work through this stage of plot development before they have the linguistic skills to tackle activities that ask them to ‘stand aside’ from the story. One of the most useful starting points is to use a well-known fairy story. As I have already mentioned the story is not ‘acted out’ or retold, you are only using the story as the context. Try and choose stories that have interesting settings, lively characters and a strong narrative. When I am working with a large class I may ask the children to be friends of a character in the story. This way you can include all the children and not just one or two who are asked to be important. Along the way children may cast themselves into a character role, but this is usually a ploy to move the story forward. A main character does not drive most interactive stories. The storylines are more about righting wrongs, finding people or things, taking people or things back home, confronting enemies and going on quests. By choosing a story you already know as the starting point, you have the opportunity to identify some of the learning areas the story explores. Sometimes there are opportunities to explore universal ideas such as: How do we find out what people are like? How do we deal with people who are different? How do we manage things that frighten us? How do we cope with bullies and people who seem more powerful than us? How do we handle things that go wrong? How do we become more independent? Starting, stopping and controlling the action You may be a bit apprehensive about launching into this kind of activity as you may feel that it will be difficult to handle inappropriate behaviour. Allowing children to direct the activity does not mean that you have to lose control. It is a good idea to introduce the children to signals, either spoken or non-verbal to indicate when the story has begun and when you want the story to finish. There are also devices called dramatic conventions that you can use to structure and shape the story. They can be employed when you want to focus the children’s attention on a question, an event, issues or concepts that arise during the story. You can use these conventions to isolate, freeze or focus moments of the action and explore these moments in more depth. The most used convention is: Teacher-in-role This is the strongest device for the adult to use. It allows you to enter the story as someone who usually needs the help of the group. When you do this you are demonstrating that you value what the children are doing. You are not expected to enter into some elaborate theatrical performance, just to behave with integrity within the role you choose. By putting yourself inside the story you are giving yourself a very strong position to challenge perceptions, ask for information, develop narrative and maximise the learning potential of the activity. It is useful to use some signal to indicate to the children when you are in role and when you are not. Think carefully about the status of the role you choose and how it positions the children. If, for example, you take on the low-status role of someone who needs help, or someone who cannot do a certain task, the children are empowered into a high-status position where they have to guide and support you. Mantle of the Expert By manipulating the kinds of role you play you can place the children in the role of ‘expert.’ You put them in the role of people with specialist knowledge. This can be a very effective way to assess children’s understanding of parts of the curriculum such as scientific or mathematical ideas. Still Image This is convention works well as the beginning of the story. Children are asked to hold a pose as if they were in a picture from the story. After taking up their still pose on your signal the story begins. It is also useful if you want to finish the story for that session. You would ask children to take up a pose, make the picture and ask them to remember it for next time. Thought Tracking This can be used in conjunction with ‘still image’. When the children are frozen you go round and touch individuals on the shoulder and ask them to tell you what they are thinking about what has happened. This can act as a calming device and gives focus to what they have been doing. It is useful to voice what children have said: "This villager thinks we need to be careful if we try to go to this castle." “This woman is frightened for her children. She thinks the wolf might come.” Personalised Objects I use this device if the story is about to take us on a journey. I will ask to the group to show me something they want to bring with them to help them on the journey. Every one sits in a circle and tells the others what they have bought. You are out of role and you might like to make some comments about the objects. If it is a torch someone has brought you could say:” That’ll be very useful if we find ourselves travelling in the dark” or something like a Teddy Bear “I’m glad we've got Teddy with us, he will bring us comfort.” This is sometimes quite a useful device because should children suddenly produce something that they did not show you, you can challenge where it came from. This often can diffuse the ‘I’ve got a gun’ syndrome. An Example of an Interactive Story using a well-known Fairy Story as the starting point. The Princess and the Frog Tell or read the story of the Princess and the Frog up to the part where the Princess has promised to kiss the frog in exchange for her golden ball. Explain to the children that you and they are going to make a story together and that in the story we can be different people and go to different places using our imagination. Tell the children that the adults will be in the story too. In today’s story you (using teacher-in-role) are going to be the frog and they are going to be friends of the frog. (They can choose either to be frogs or other creatures that live near the pond. If you have been doing work on woodland creatures this is a way of assessing what they have learnt) Gather everyone and get them sitting in a circle. The space in the middle becomes the edge of the well and you signal that the story is about to begin. Go into role as the frog. Tell the children how the princess came and tricked you into getting her golden ball from the well. (I get up at this point and look down into the well and describe how dark and cold it is) The princess had promised you a kiss but she ran away before she had done it. (Here is a useful point to discuss what the children think about people who don’t keep their promises) You want the children to help you find the princess’s castle and make her give you the kiss. Ask the children whether anyone knows where the castle is. Explain that you have never been further than your pond before and you are frightened (this puts the children into the mantle of the expert role). You have heard there are creatures around that like to eat frogs. Also you can only hop so if it is a very long way they may have to make some transport. Listen carefully to the children’s answers. If you are working with other adults arrange the children into smaller groups to talk about what they know. Give children time to answer. Be prepared for silences to give them thinking time. Take the beginning slowly. Try not to push the story forward yourself — this makes it your story not the children’s. Be confident in the children’s storytelling abilities. Take the story where it goes. You might find yourself climbing trees, flying on the backs of birds, running away from dangerous creatures, building ladders to get into the castle etc. (Each of these events is mimed, ask children what they are doing and can they show you).The end of the story comes when the princess has been found and she kisses the frog. He then turns into the handsome prince. Two children can play the princess and the princess at the end.This story could be split into several sessions of about 20 minutes each— stopping each section with a cliff-hanger — something is stirring in the wood, finding a large river that you can’t cross, night falls and you have to find shelter. I am sure this kind of activity sounds very daunting but I can assure you once you have done one or two the children will want more. They will remember these stories for a very long time. I was in a Primary School a few years ago when I was stopped by an eleven year old girl in the playground. “You probably won’t remember me”, she said,” but I was the Seagull who helped the class find the eagle in that story you made with us”. Yes, I did remember and it was six years before! Try it, you may become hooked.
Recommended Comments
There are no comments to display.