Story time is bonding time; a chance for parents and children to leave the day behind and enter the world of the imagination.
Fresh from their hugely successful storytelling workshops at the Body and Soul festival, Vered Zur of Expressive Arts Ireland spoke to Fiona McGarry about bringing the magic of storytelling into family life and parenting.
“Storytelling opens the senses and the imagination. Stories are food for the soul and can help to sustain us in hard times. Stories have traditionally been handed down within families, from generation to generation, so storytelling has always been important in every culture. It’s universal and one of the oldest art forms in the world. With children, storytelling is helpful for every stage of development.”
Our children are now aged between 18 and 27 and they still work with us at our storytelling workshops and camps. When they were younger, storytelling was really important in our family. Every night, story time was very special. Our approach would be to take a story and make it more personal to our family.”
Tell the story, don’t just read it. We really want parents to feel confident in telling stories and not just reading them from books. The telling is what’s most important. When you tell a story, find your own connection to it. Feel free to improvise and take the story anywhere you want. Use your eyes and your body language to bring the story to life. Put your own personality into it. Teach your child to tell the story too.
Take ideas from stories in books, but to tell them in a different way. Put your heart into the stories. Children get to know you that way. They’re really interested in knowing your personality and your life. You can tell them stories from your own childhood and that’s really interesting and important to them.”
Storytelling can also improve self-confidence and help develop social and relationship skills. When you tell stories from different parts of the world, you create an understanding of different cultures and of how different people live. This year at Body and Soul we had a great response to stories from India. People were really engaged. It was great to see that the parents enjoyed the storytelling workshops too. One of the things that’s important to us is to bring children together who are of different ages. From the age of five or six, children are getting that bit more independent. It’s good for them to have the experience of connecting with other adults. It’s also wonderful to see children of different ages working together. It’s wonderful to see parents and children engaging with each other and with other families.”
Some of what we do involves working with quite challenged teenagers and children. It’s amazing to see how they relate to the stories we tell. We teach them how to tell stories too and show them that each of us can be a storyteller. We want children to know that they are able to do this. They don’t have to be able to write the story down. We show them simple ways to create the story. Different kinds of stories help children to learn about life and give them encouragement and confidence.”
We’ll be at Electric Picnic and EarthSong this summer. Our children are part of our crew. That’s our way of reaching out to other families. We run workshops in Dublin, Kilkenny, Cork and Galway. If we can, we will work with any group that asks us.”
Vered and Boaz Zur are members of Irish Association of Creative Arts Therapists (IACAT). They work in the areas of therapy, education, social change, performance and community arts. Vered and Boaz hold MAs in Expressive Arts Therapy and are currently completing PhDs.
You can find out more about their work on their website and Facebook page.
