Storying
- documentation panels from a year long, nursery-wide focus on children’s narrative powers (age 0 - 5)
‘A wizard in a dragon’s mouth!’
Charlie (age 3) moments after arriving in the forest‘People think stories are shaped by people. But actually, it’s the other way around.’
Terry Pratchett / writerReflections Nursery and Small School (director: Martin Pace / pedagogical lead: Deb Wilenski / board designs by Deb Wilenski, Teresa Grimaldi, Laura Magnavacchi / Laura Brannon
When does a story begin? How does a story end? Do babies tell stories? Can one word be a story?
When we decided to focus for a year on children’s own story-making, it was like tuning in to a radio station that has always been broadcasting. The more we listened the more we heard: at all times of day, across locations, in surprising as well as conventional languages. Children used stories to develop their play and investigations, to invite others into imagined worlds, to explain the unexpected, to wonder about things they couldn’t see.
There were two words that remained absent from the children’s storying. We never heard a story that finished with ‘The End’. Storying was a continuous process, journeying from place to place, transforming ends into beginnings, and often starting suddenly right in the fantastical middle. The panels below represent a small fraction of our observations and reflections, and our research on STORYING flowed into year-long focuses on ANIMATION and SOUND.