Full Day Workshop

Creative Storytelling, Movement, and Mime:
Making Learning Kinesthetic and Creative

One of the contributing authors to The Storytelling Classroom, Spinning Tales, and Active Learning will introduce participants to strategies for making the curriculum creative and kinesthetic. Many elementary and primary students need opportunities to move. Stories, mime, and movement provide bright children with creative, kinesthetic challenges, while offering all children mnemonics for concepts to be learned. For example, parts of speech, grammar, one-celled organisms, types of rocks or penguins, geographic forms, and elements of art and architecture all have narrative and kinesthetic aspects. After demonstrations, participants will learn strategies to use with students for creative work using story structures, mime, characters, hand puppets, and story slotting for writing, social studies, science and math.

The underpinning of narrative is movement: movement of emotions, images, and plot. Some of the exploration activities participants will learn include the Adverb Game, Opposite Character Machine, the Sound Screen, the Rondo Form, Pictures in Four Parts and Be the Thing.

Participants will have the opportunity to be actively involved in moving, creating sound effects with world percussion instruments, creating and narrating, and examining resources for movement, mime, and storytelling. Movement, mime, folktales, tall tales, and family stories make the curriculum creative and kinesthetic.