0698 – Story-telling For A Young Audience

2022.11.29 – 0698 – Story-telling For A Young Audience

Story-telling for a young audience

For younger pairs of ears, think particularly about the storytelling journey. Children’s books are often very much about emotion and change: the lonely girl who finds friends with seven dwarves; the poor boy who climbs a beanstalk and escapes from a new land with a pot of gold and so on. So play with those feelings and colour the changes which help the story arc: make the princess sound lonely, make Jack sound frightened and then relieved as he escapes the giant.

Look carefully at the rhymes, rhythms and repetitions in the sentences, how the author plays with the words in an almost musical way and bring that out in your telling of the tale. (Some say that having a musical background helps with reading aloud, giving you a greater sense of timing, tempo, tone and rhythm.)

Add a bit of playfulness to the words (say words like “surprise”, “discovered”, “lonely”, “strange” or “sighed” in the appropriate tone of surprise, discovery and so on), and to the phrases (“he drank the potion and started to shrink”, elongating “started to shrink” with a sense of wonder, and maybe with “shrink” said in an appropriately higher pitched voice to indicate the small size). 

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