March 17, 2009
"We've been working with singing and speech, let's consider now the art of telling stories. Children love them and we can all become storytellers for their sake, weaving in moral lessons we want to teach and connecting deeply with our children in the process. As with singing, we discover that we are all singers, we are also all storytellers even if we don't know it - yet.
Exerpt from ""All About Kids"" Magazine Feb. 1992
Don't Know and Pajamas
by Cathy Habes
After cookies, ""Curious George"" and kisses goodnight, I turn out the light. My four-year-old son says, ""Tell us a story with no book."" His two-year-old brother echoes the plea.
""Once upon a time,"" I begin, ""there were two boys named Danny and Joey..."" Then I pause.
When this ritual first began, I wondered what plot I could concoct from my sleepy brain that would possibly satisfy their hunger for stories. I found myself drawing heavily on plots in which they meet their favorite cartoon heroes and join forces with them in vanquishing the foes of Earth Itself.
""That was good."" Danny would sigh afterward: but I was dissatisfied with my own junky thinking. Did an exciting story have to include fist fights and space ships?
As time passed, I polished my style a bit. Danny and Joey were written into the scripts of various gems of childhood literature that I knew by heart. Danny danced down the street with his friends in a rock'n roll version of rThe Pied Piper, encountered the Cat in the Hat. Each vied to be the brother who fell down the well in an adaptation of tTikki Tikki Tembo.
But I think I really hit on something when one night I simply repeated the details of the events of that day. Plain and simple, I told what happened from my point of view, and in the telling I found myself making Danny and Joey into the heroes of their own lives.
They demanded more such stories about ""what we did today,"" delighted to hear about the adventures and successes of a routine trip to the playground. I dwelt lovingly on the details of each finger-painted picture done at the playtable and could repeat their friendly negotiations with playmates almost verbatim.
Nothing seemed to please them more than these intricate reaffirmations of their worth and progress. Then one night Danny asked me to tell him a story about something he desired - a pet, specifically a brown and white hamster named Pajamas. It was a touching request and a truly original one.
""What pet would you like in the story?"" I asked Joey. ""A Puppy?""
""An elephant!"" shouted my two-year-old.
""What will his name be?""
""Don't know,"" Joey replied. So that night I told the first tale of Pajamas, the hamster and Don't Know the baby elephant.
The stories are still grounded in the day-to-day stuff of reality. Danny has played hide-and-seek with Pajamas, who hid in his shoe, under his bed, and behind his cereal bowl. Joey has taken Don't Know for a walk in the rain and had to clean the elephant's muddy feet with a broom and a bucket of water. We have speculated about what would happen if Pajamas and Don't Know went to the grocery store, the bowling alley, and kindergarten.
Mundane as they might sound, these stories are far more exciting, warm, and meaningful than the flat, relentlessly agressive tales I used to spin about Ninja Turtles. Now the boys often join in with their own ideas about the script. At the end of two short but thrilling tales, they are ready for sleep -- as long as I promise to tell more stories tomorrow.
It is delicious to feel my children grow and shine in the light of the stories of their lives. It is delicious, too, to experience my own stretching and growing. I had never dreamed I could craft an impromptu tale that would so delight a small audience. A bit of practice and experimentation was all it took to free the storyteller in me.
I don't think too much about my stories: I don't plan what I will say each night. I pause with my eyes closed in the dark room and wait to see what Pajamas and Don't Know are up to tonight. They have taken on a life of their own now, this odd couple invented by my children's hearts."