Storytelling Tips from Leslie Perry

"Grandfather of Los Angeles Storytelling" Leslie Perry shares some storytelling lessons with children at the Boys and Girls Club of Pomona Valley -- and they teach him one too.

Leslie Perry: Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock

"Grandfather of Los Angeles Storytelling" Leslie Perry shares his version of this classic African folk tale with children at the Boys and Girls Club of Pomona Valley.

2nd Grade Storytelling Lesson Plan: Sound Stories

BARACHOIS

After exploring how music and other auditory stimuli can inspire us to see visual imagery and narrative threads through our mind’s eye (for example, Barachois' "La Marmotteuse" -- click here to hear a sample), students will make their own kazoo and retell a traditional tale with gestures and sounds but without words. Telling a story without words effectively reinforces the understanding that sounds and movements are a critical elements of a performer’s repertoire. Through the process of building their own instruments, students will also learn scientific concepts behind how sound is created through vibrations. This lesson plan covers California 2nd grade standards in Music, Theater and Physical Sciences.

Posey, Sandra Mizumoto. "Sound Stories." 2nd Grade Lesson Plan.

3rd Grade Storytelling Lesson Plan: The Giving Tree

Books provide important lessons, but students often feel wedded to the text. Incorporating props, pantomime and telling rather than reading a story to them can ignite their ambition for wanting to tell their own stories or to add their own creative touches to an existing story. Students will learn to understand acting and literature vocabulary while performing a play using props and pantomime. Students will also get the opportunity to become the narrator, not through memorization, but through working with the images of the plot sheet they complete in the activity process. This gives children the chance to go through the storytelling process without feeling intimidated and learning a cornucopia of terms without realizing they are learning so much. The plot sheet the students complete will guide them to recreating the story through visual images, which eliminates the students from being tied down to something written down on paper.

Students in Sandra Posey's EWS 411: Education, Diversity and the Arts course created storytelling-based lesson plans which integrate multidisciplinary standards. These lesson plans were then implemented at the Boys and Girl's Club of Pomona Valley as a service-learning project. This lesson plan, by Amy Tapia, Margarita Campos, Jennie Ramirez and Rosmary Manyuco
addresses California theater and English Language Arts standards for third grade (with adaptations provided for fourth and sixth).

Campos, Margarita, Rosmary Manyuco, Jennie Ramirez and Amy Tapia. "Plotting the Giving Tree." 4th Grade Lesson Plan, with Adaptations for 4th and 6th Grades.