On September 22, 2008, my drama class students had a storytelling activity with the primary students. The goal for this task is to apply all the elements and key terms we learned about storytelling during drama classes, and try to retell the knowledge we learned back to the primary students. Here is my reflection for this activity.

The definition for story telling is a live, person to person oral presentation that includes physically interaction. When you are telling a story, there should always be a direct contact between the audience and the teller. In my point of view, I think the storytelling activity held by school is trying to helping us share the key elements of storytelling we learned with other students, as well as feeling the interaction between the teller and the audience.

The story I have chosen is “Not Our Problem”. The story is about a king who did not care about the incidents happened in his kingdom, and finally resulted in destroying his own kingdom. In order to grab the students’ attention, I brought my own toys that were related to the story during the sharing section. For the “interaction” between me and the primary students, I included a special section at the end of the storytelling, which is engaging the students to retell the story back to me. I found this method extremely useful, for I could tell how the student has understood the whole story, as well as the parts students has missed out. Although sometimes I have to share a primary student with another drama class student, I could still become personally engaged with my listener when they were retelling back the story to me.

When I was told to share the story with a third grade student, I took an informed risk that is using more complex words such as “wipe up” and “puffed rice” during the storytelling. At first, I wondered whether it is correct to use these words. However, I knew I made the right decision during the retelling part. My buddy actually retold the story back to me nice and detailed, while including the complex word I said! It really surprised me, for it is beyond my expectation.

I thanked the school for letting us to contact with the primary students. Last but not least, I hope the school would extend these activities beyond drama class, and held similar activities in other classes.