Tell Me A Story: Poetry

My fallback storytelling is to start with what is in front of me. I use details from what I'm looking at or something we did that morning or some concrete event and tell stories from there.

And I've realized that is quite useful, it also can be limiting when I only rely on those techniques.

And I've also realized that LP has NO PRECONCEPTIONS about poetry and all the delightful things that make something poetic (simile, metaphor, imagery and so on). So all the fear voices in my head that criticize my poetic efforts are now dismissed.

So recently I'm reminding myself to play with those things and tell a story about the trees talking with the stars in the sky and a cloud's adventure floating overhead and to imagine eating ice cream is like eating a snowdrift.

This also evolved into a game yesterday when LP was cuddled up in my lap after we spent a good bit of time attempting to plant potatoes (various mishaps occurred, it is quite possible they won't come up). I blew on her and said "Mama is the wind and LP is the tree with lots of leaves" and she giggled. After a few times she started to rock against me and I said "LP is the ocean crashing into Mama as the beach." And she said "crash, crash" getting more intentional in her movements. After a minute or so, she cuddled in again and said "I'm a bird" and when I said "and I am a nest" she said, "Where's mama bird?" So I became that instead.

It was sweet and playful and seemed to fill her up more than a cuddle on its own. (This is pretty crucial these days when I am so hungry for her to play more independently).

Bringing it back again is the name of the game

Reincorporation is one of those apparently simple ideas that packs a lot of power.

As an improv performer, I've seen the incredible impact it can have on an audience to bring back an idea or story element. As an audience member, I've been immensely satisfied when a performer weaves something from earlier back into the action -- even if I had forgotten it, I recognize it and find it deeply satisfying.

And who loves repetition? Little people. So who lights up at reincorporation? Yup, that's them again.

The challenge for me is often remembering something to reincorporate. Here's a couple of tricks I use when doing storytelling and pretend play with LP:

• Repeat the element a couple of times immediately...this can be repeating a word or phrase or using an object a few times so it will stick in your mind.

• Notice a connection between an idea or story element and a physical object so that physical object will jog your memory.
  

An example of both of these in action: LP had a long, involved story going with leaves in a nest (my hands) which involved a lot of repetition (putting the leaves in the nest, having the nest sing them a lullaby, feeding the leaves, counting the leaves in the nest, etc). A few days later, we were taking a walk to deliver a book to a friend and she stopped to pick leaves and did not want to budge. I walked a bit ahead and held my hands out like a nest saying "here's the nest..." LP's face lit up and she scooted over and we walked along with her new leaves in the nest of my hands, picking up the game right away.

Read it again...and again...and again...

Another quickie from the land of no naps, teething, and colds.

It is of great joy to me how much LP loves her books. Initially I thought, "I will read to this child whenever and however much she wants." Ha! It isn't possible!

One of the many special things of her interest in books is witnessing the changes in how she interacts with the books both as physical objects and with the characters and storylines. AND now that she's got some letter recognition - it is a whole new thing to read a book to her.

AND like any self-respecting toddler, repetition is her game.

So how to keep reading the same book over and over fresh? Or if not fresh, at least not maddeningly brain-dulling awful?

Here's a couple of ideas:

• Read in an accent or funny voice the whole way through
  
• Pick a musical style and sing it (jazz, opera, broadway musical)
• Imagine you are the voiceover at a movie as you read in a dramatic voice
• Pick a movie or theater genre (documentary, film noir, western) and see how that influences your reading

When I use things from that list, I often try to switch it up every reading (except LP is a HUGE fan of the jazz-scat reading and often wants that one again).

Storytime: Working Out the Fear

The nights have been long this past week; LP has entered a phase (hopefully a short phase) of waking up around 12:30 screaming.

The first two nights, it seemed to be night terrors connected to a mask she was fascinated by at a Mexican restaurant. The next night was a mystery. The next two nights seemed to be because I wasn't home at bedtime (for the first time in a loooong time, too looong a time). And the last two nights have been because she is trying to drive me over the edge (not far to go right now, the sleep deprivation is severe). Is it a new habit? More night terrors? Teething? Growing pains? A mysterious phase that will work itself out because that is what happens...things change and change and change.

LP & I did work through the mask fear by using stories. (During the day, storytelling did nothing for us in the middle of the night.)

Over 2-3 days, most of the stories we told together were about the mask. Some were in passing, some were sitting down and focused and some were while sculpting masks out of sand at the playground.

The mask was described again and again (green with big eyes and a red tongue sticking out); the mask made friends with Gumby (they do have being green in common) and a frog (hmmm...more green, I'm sensing a theme in LP's life), AND then the mask learned the dreidel song and sang it with LP ("I have a little dreidel, I made it out of clay..."). Learning the dreidel song seemed to be the thing that put her fears about the mask to rest.

Maybe someone could do some stories with me to work out my fear of never getting enough sleep?

Once upon a time...once upon a time...

There is something magic to me about the phrase "once upon a time..." I have a recollection of reading that all known languages have some equivalent phrase which is a cue for a story. (Though it doesn't cover all known languages wikipedia has a fun to read entry with a list of common story beginnings and endings in a bunch of them. I'm particularly intrigued by the many versions that start with "There was, and there wasn't....)

One of the sweetest sounds to me these days is LP prompting me to participate by saying "Once upon a time..."

Recently, she has begun telling me some very short stories. Tonight I discovered that if I repeated the phrase(s) she had just said, she would add the next detail. It went something like this:

LP: Once upon a time...
Me: Once upon a time..
LP: There was...
Me: Once upon a time there was...
LP: A frog!
Me: Once upon a time there was a frog...
LP: A frog...in a blue shirt looked for flowers.
Me: Once upon a time there was a frog in a blue shirt who looked for flowers.
LP: Pink flowers!
Me: Once upon a time, there was a frog in a blue shirt who looked for pink flowers...
LP: To smell and smell.
Me: Once upon a time there was a frog in a blue shirt who looked for pink flowers to smell and smell.
(Then LP was done with both the story and her dinner.)

Really something to watch her creative mind in action, pulling together different ideas. I was surprised by how quickly she jumped on adding elements and seemed engaged by my repeating the whole of it.

Storytime - take a new path off a familiar trail

Today was my drop-in improv story group at Habitot (habitot.org)....This has been my first month and it is a great lab for ideas and learning experience for me.

The age range of the kids in the drop-in group as been a few months old to around 4 years old...my practice lab at home with LP is exclusive to her specific 2 year old development so I have to bring a focused improv mindset to work with the range of abilities and interests int he room.

Today I experimented with using a mix of the familiar to get started and then following/creating a new story based on the participation.

I prepared for my internally titled "Chicken Story Day!" by reviewing the stories of Chicken Little and the Little Red Hen and remembering to bring my props (a stash of homemade seed "pods" I've been making - all stuffed with green fabric to pull out to make plants grow and lovely generic blue, green and yellow large pieces of fabric to serve as whatever was needed).

I also used familiar songs and let them get a "twist"...starting with "Hello, everybody, it's so nice to see you.." which the kids know from a bazillion storytimes, music groups, etc and using that song to "wake up" the different animals on the farm.

The Chicken Little story had a chicken puppet using one of the seedpods so then I passed them out to all the people - big & little- to work together in planting a full crop that we planted, watered, helped grow, harvested and finally feasted on.

Although neither story wandered too far off the familiar path, I think this has a lot of potential as a "story prompt" when my making it up well is dry. The LPs of the world can always help trigger our imaginations to tell the story of the three golf carts when we were headed off to tell the Three Little Pigs again.

On a funny note, LP spent most of the session amusing herself with different puppets and other farm props in the area except for coming up to me on a fairly regular basis to say "sing a song." So then...there were songs (one improvised from scratch, one take-off on a known song and one version of "Twinkle Twinkle" as sung by ducks).

Silly Stories

My friend Trina and I were talking about linear vs. nonlinear storytelling and how the story-spine guides a particular kind of linear story. She's in educational publishing and is also bilingual (Spanish) so had some insights into how an emphasis on linear stories is very American.

For variety, treat your kiddo(es) and yourself to a nonlinear wordplay or story treat!

There are many, many examples in children's literature and these often are based in funny rhyming and made up words and just plain old delicious word play.

A few ideas:

Rhyming words back and forth. LP loves to do this and the "rules" such as they are include any word rhymes that she says, we can repeat words and make up words ("ishkaboo" and "blue" and "new" all rhyme with "new")

Tell a story about a favorite animal and see how far you can get with rhymes (see if you can let go of making "sense"). For example: There once was a duck, a lucky duck, lucky dippy ducky duck who drove a truck with lots of pluck into muckity muck. (That satisfies for a whole story sometimes). When we build on that, I ask LP a question like "what did the duck do next?" or "who did the duck meet?"...sometimes it simply loops back into the rhymes we did (if I remember them, otherwise it is all new territory) and other times moves forward as the duck and crocodile nap for awhile, while they smile in a pile that went for a mile.

A purely gibberish story. Gibberish is a made up language that anyone can speak...it can be as simple as "blah blah blahblahblah blaaaaah blah" (think the adults in the Charlie Brown specials) or in an animal language (The cow told a story "Once upon a moo, moo moooo moo moo"). Use inflection, intonation speed, emphasis etc to give meaning to it. You don't need to know what the meaning its, this is all about playing with language.

Sound effects story...all about adding those fun noises. "Walking through the mud I squish, squash, sploosh. The rain pitter-patters, patter-pitters then comes down with a whoosh! "

Those are my first thoughts about it...please do share your ideas too!

Color everything - there are no lines!

Here's a simple one that I'm getting a lot of mileage out of these days.

Color - which in improv is all about description, to verbally color in the scene, character, story, moment, etc.

LP is very into (and loyal to) her stuffed buddies. Yesterday the way out of a tantrum/meltdown of the "I'm not napping" origin (a very long one at that), was when I started to describe Mona Cow who she was holding onto. Something like this:

Once upon a time there was a cow named Mona Cow. She was a brown cow, a light brown cow with dark brown spots. She had two eyes. She had two soft brown ears and two small soft pink horns. She had dark brown hooves. She liked to stand on her back two legs....she wore her favorite sweater. The sweater is orange with pink trim.

And so on, and so on...really stating the obvious. LP would cue me about what was most interesting to her that she wanted to hear again ("she had horns") or more about (as she kept playing with Mona's sweater to see if it would come off).

I "colored" for at least 10 minutes, maybe more. This could easily turn into a story. In this instance, LP was inspired to have Mona Cow want to read a book so we read the books of Mona's choice (Goodnight Gorilla and Mrs Wow Never Wanted a Cow).

Variations: Describe what your little person points to or is looking at, ask your little person questions to help with the description or just tell a descriptive story (no action necessary, all scene setting and then it can be foundation to come back to and expand into an action story...if this evolves with Mona Cow, I'll share it)

I find this really good for me when I'm feeling uncreative, overtired and a little cranky...suppose I could've used a nap too.

Story Spine

One of my favorite improv exercises is also a great tool for telling stories with babies/toddlers. Called the story spine, I learned it from Kat Koppett (a most fabulous improvisor/teacher/trainer and mom...check her out at koppett.com) who I think learned it from the originator, Kenn Adams.

Here's the structure (just finish the sentence and voila! you have a story)

Once upon a time...
Every day...
Until one day...
Because of that...
Because of that...
(repeat "Because of that..." as often as you like)
Until finally...
Ever since that day...

Optional ending line: The moral of the story is...

Seem familiar? Most fairy tales and a lot of kids' stories as well as novels, movies, etc fit in this story structure. Simple & brilliant!

When LP was a very small one, I would use this to make up very short stories for her. It evolved into part of our nighttime routine. Bath, diaper &pjs , milk, swaddle and a made-up story. For awhile I got into a groove of an ongoing made-up story (starring Baby LP, of course with her friends Baby Bird and Baby Turtle). The stories were oftensurprisingly moralistic to me. Maybe as a new parent, I needed a world that was very black and white in terms of right and wrong. It was a comforting stance although I seem to be back to a more seeing the gray, humanistic, and well, blurrier view of things.

Over time, realizing that LP wasn't judging the stories AT ALL, I started to relax and let myself be more playful, explore new avenues, nonsense avenues...and let my daily experiences, the real where I was at, filter in. Well, perhaps more than filter in...in one particular episode Baby LP saved the day as she protected her friends by scaring off the terrifying squirrel with projectile spit-up.

Now that LP is older, this structure supports our telling stories collaboratively. It is an activity that we can do almost anytime and almost anywhere (particularly good for public transit). Sometimes LP participates by finishing the sentences and other times by my asking her questions (who did the frog see?). (Many of our stories feature frogs or crocodiles. Those are the hot topics in our house these days.)

Sometimes it even evolves into telling a story one word at a time. These are particularly short stories but she seems to enjoy them a lot. I wonder if it feels like being equals? (More on word-at-a-time story in another post).

I do still get caught up in judging our stories sometimes. They are often simple. I have to remind myself that if LP is engaged, it is happening just as it should. AND I am able to stay engaged by keeping alert to opportunities to see what else we can do with the story spine.

Also, stories for kids often are simple.

And repetitive. Repetitive. Repetitive. Again? Really? We just read that book 5 times...how about this one? Nope. Read and repeat. Storytell and repeat...AND I find it easier to introduce something new...some bit of color or filling out a moment or acting out an animal noise. Anything helps sometimes.

One new thing that has emerged very recently...LP likes to start off our collaborative stories the same way and then changes one element that then effects the outcome. For example, a story a few days ago was about a pterodactyl and pterodon who need a dog to help them out (the pterodactyl gets stuck in a tree after it was flying along very fast) was changed significantly when LP, after a lot of thought, made it a crocodile who comes along to help out. Very different kinds of solutions become possible with a crocodile!o