The Storytelling School

The Storytelling School: Handbook for Teachers

This handbook describes a revolutionary way of delivering primary education. In a storytelling school all children learn to be storytellers, retelling and improving stories from memory as a way of learning both language and subject content across the curriculum. Children graduate with a repertoire of their own stories to tell. This approach has been shown to raise standards and fire imaginations in schools throughout the UK.

Chris Smith and Adam Guillain show you how to make this happen. The handbook draws on more than ten years experience researching and developing this way of teaching. Piloted, researched and updated, this second edition includes new chapters on non-fiction teaching and cross-curricular integration across the school. It is packed with practical activities, examples, theory, charts, diagrams and pages to photocopy. The Storytelling School offers step-by-step explanations on how to become a storytelling school, including how to:

• Tell stories to your class
• Develop and innovate on a learned story
• Invent new stories
• Link storytelling to improving writing standards
• Apply the method to non-fiction teaching
• Plan across the curriculum using the Storytelling School approach

About the Author

Chris Smith, PhD, is an Oxford-based storyteller, musician, teacher, and founding director of Storytelling Schools, the fruit of ten years’ research and development experience. He has a passion for Arab folktales, myths, and legends, developed while living in Palestine. He takes storytelling into a variety of institutions including schools, universities, museums and prisons, working with adults and children alike.

Adam Guillian is a primary-school teacher, an educational consultant, a writer of children’s fiction and storyteller. Based in Oxford, he journeys in and out of schools where he runs workshops and trains teachers.