Stories and kids

The first day of the storytelling workshop has left me exhausted but satisfied.  Thanks to Jordan Lutheran, we have a large air-conditioned space in which to spend the hottest time of day.  I expected to have a half hour to martial the volunteers and set out the activties but when I got to the church some eager parents and kids were already there.   I'm afraid I got a little flustered in a cheery sort of way, cut my finger, had to leave in the middle of several conversations to make sure volunteers knew what was up.  I hope those Moms realized I was more organized than I seemed.  Good thing I just bought a spiffy, nifty First Aid kit, so I could show off my bandaging skills to the parents.  Tomorrow, I will get there an hour early.

At noon, I always wonder how I am going to get to 2 pm.  At 2 pm, I always wonder where the day went.
One of my teen volunteers started as a workshop goer four or five years ago.  She gave me some excellent suggestions for active games to fill in the lunch time.  I toyed with the idea of sending them outside but there is not much shade and the room we're in is huge.

At the end of the day, we sat around and I gave them their homework.  They had to find a story to share.  It could not be a movie or a chapter book because there are 18 of them and we don't want to fall asleep listening to loooooong stories.  I have plenty of photocopied stories they can page through.

We talked about stories and ended up discussing how curses get reversed, as in The Frog Prince.  In the original story, the princess throws the frog against a wall!!!  What kind of twisted witch would make that the counter curse?  So I asked them, "If I turned Nandini into a toadstool, how could she get turned back?"  They decided she had to get to the Mall as a toadstool to be turned back into herself.

Several funny scenarios came out of that curse and counter curse.  The exercise was such fun that I added to their home work.  They had to come up with a curse AND they had to come up with a way the curse could be broken.  I can't wait for tomorrow.