Storytelling with Craig Jenkins

On my first day as a volunteer in a storytelling festival, I met this expressive, funny man named Craig Jenkins.

He starts the session with ‘Say aaaa…. Iiiii… Uuu.. Eee… Oooo… Hey..’ in a funny way. And then he begun to told us bout how to presenting a story with various moves and sounds.

Here’s what I’ve write, I possibly missed one or two things..

SOUNDS

You should make a difference for every characters in your story. So, the audiences can really absorp themselves into the story and rhey’ll remember the characters.

To keep focusing the audiences, ask them to copy the sounds of every characters everytime you mention it names , surprisingly. Give them this instructions ‘anytime you hear the character, you should say how they sounds like.’ So they can really focusing to the stories.

That technique is very useful to keep their focus and attention!!

If you loose their attention, repeat the words more often.

You can presenting each characters by their sounds (continously) or one at a time together.

Anitger way to keep the audiences attention is ask them (in a group) to create the sounds of each characters or the environment (ex. the sea, forest). To give them a chance to have their voice heard. Every sounds is right, there’s no wrong answers. It works well with children.

HAND

This technique will give benefits for the childrens who learns from a different ways, such as hearing, watching, moving their body, etc.

How to do it?

Encourage them to copy your gesture.

Encourage them to create their own gesture.

Takes the one that works well for you. When you do a storytelling, do it in a way its best for you. Whatever comforts you!Dance, sing, different language, comical, etc.

SMELL AND TASTE

Ask the audience to take a role in a scene. Showing how they feel about something (smelling, gesturing). Ask them to participate in a story.

Give them objects and ask them how they feel regarding the objects. Describe the objects and how it feels.  Let them do the act.

As the storyteller, you have to tell the children about every objects or role and makes them believe how it feels (taste, smell, etc.). Bring the characters or objects to live and makes everyone believe it.

The best way to learn is to experience it. So you could come up with a scene where you let the children to act in your show.

For the older children, dont expect much. Just a little sign that they paying attention to you, take the moment.