Mr Kelly story telling

For the past few weeks, we have been creating fairytale like stories to perform to young children, we have incorporated alot of story telling techniques like Movement. In the first play we did little red riding hood, i play the part of the wolf. its really good because we have alot of different movement sequences which are good at keeping children engaged and focused. I also really enjoyed the fact that we created the forest or when we became animals of the forest, its also quite difficult story telling to children, because you have to use a completely different tone of voice to keep them engaged, also throughout little red riding hood. Dan Mckay narrates it, which is helping the children to understand the storyline.

Aswell as the small dances in the piece, there is also a song, and other ways to get the audience involved. My favourite part of the play is when the other characters are singing to the Wolf about how bad he is. Its very engaging for the children because we break the fourth wall of communicating with the audience, you have to get young children involved with whats going on up on the stage. Thats a very important way to storytelling.

In the next play we have been looking at different ways of storytelling, at the start of last lesson we got together different storytelling ideas, for example, puppetry work, silouhette, physical movement. After quite a long discussion about which one would be the best for children's storytelling, we decided to give the silouhette idea a go. So we blocked every window with paper and put a huge white sheet across the room and attached it to the ceiling. After setting up a powerful light. Mr kelly got us all to form different objects in groups as little as 3 people. Only then i realised how hard it is to work with shadows. I however feel that because it was so difficult, we may not have enough time to be able to do a full run-through without making a mistake, i think somebody had the idea of someone also narrating over it. So that way the children can again follow the storyline and not be 100 percent relying on our shadows to be perfect.