3 Lessons from FreeSpinners
How kids do spontaneous storytelling
We started a new course in May and it is a rompin good time. In short, here’s the basic idea:
Kid storytellers from around the world meet once a week to build a pioneer(ish) town through collaborative and spontaneous storytelling.
There are three groups, and therefore three towns:
Misty Falls is the oldest town, historically founded by fairies, rich in agriculture and enjoys a robust festival life.
Five Points is an island community with an influx of magical creatures. Learning from these creatures has been a boon to technology and engineering.
New Town is so new it doesn’t have a name! That said, it boasts the only newspaper and hospital and seems to attract great new ideas.
Each group of kids meets once a week to develop their character, describe their home and work, and then collaboratively work through “town stuff” together. Sometimes it is sickness, sometimes it is a celebration, and other times a stranger comes to town and they sort through how to handle it.
In this way it is a typical “role playing game” except that the goal is authenticity and embodied responses.
In Freespinners, we value deeper truths, honest reactions and feelings, feelings, feelings. We use tried and true Restorative Storytelling tools in our interactions where listening is king and reflective nourishing responses are the most satisfying.
Yes we teach stuff, but in the end, its the teachers who are learning the most. Here are three lessons we learned from these young storytellers;
First up: Welcome to Misty Falls!
This was our first town, first group, and like first borns—we coddled them at first.
Then something happened.
An accident happened where I skipped ahead and jumped into a lesson they hadn’t learned yet. There was some confusion at first but then my teaching partner and I could see that they not only “got” what we were doing, but they quickly adapted it to the current narrative state of affairs. They integrated my mistake.
Since then we have both noticed that even the shy ones that don’t want to talk, when properly given space, “Get it”. They take the cues, bend their agenda and tell their story with inclusiveness and encouragement.
Lesson learned: don’t talk too much. Avoid over-explanations. Give them the benefit of the doubt that they not only get it, but might have a better solution.
Second Lesson is from Five Points.
This group is full of ideas and initially we felt a need to edit them.
In this pioneer town, we had one storyteller focused on developing a train system, and then another wishing the trains to be underground, and then another wishing to develop a space station launch pad up on one of the mountains. This is all while other storytellers were figuring out what to do with an abundance of dragons and where to put them.
Five Points is an island town where there isn’t much room for all the ideas, and we the teachers felt it was our job to make everything fit. This was the early nineteenth century, right? Space ships? What is a space ship? Dragons? Where did the dragons come from?
We found, however, that this exhausted us. Leading with “no, but…” required a great deal of effort and control on our part, but shifting to “yes, and…” gave the storytellers the permission and power to solve this themselves.
Yes, Tom builds space ships and when consulted on what to do about the dragons, he suggested harnessing their innate power for propulsion. Everyone was delighted.
Lesson learned: Stop trying to control and bend the story to fit some idea of how things should be. Say yes and see how they work together to integrate diverse ideas and perspectives.
Third lesson started out as a silly break.
From time to time I would sing an introduction or transition, but things really took off when the children started singing.
Sure, I can craft a song that holds a lesson, an impulse or a direction within and use it tactfully and intentionally. Children love to sing, so why not use that love to my advantage for classroom management and moving the pedagogy forward?
But once again, by accident, we made room for one of the kids to create a “theme song” for New Town, and the child exploded with spontaneous verse. We wrote down the words and now the song has been celebrated and published in the New Town Press, the local newspaper conceived and published on a weekly basis entirely by the young storytellers. Here is the New Town Theme written by the town baker Frank Condor:
Building, forming and designing
We are all the way into the lining
We have all we need
And we don't need to flee
'Cause we are building and designing
Like New Town should be anew.
There is a lot there. Yes he was being spontaneous and prioritized rhyming but the gist of the song is very true. We build all the time. We can commit to each other and trust the impulse. We are a new town that needs lots of room to create and experiment.
That storyteller is 7 years old.
Lesson Learned: We are storytellers, yes—but give them other outlets for their narrative work. Songs, drawings, improv, sculpture. With each medium comes something unharnessed and transformative.
We are having a fabulous time in our three towns and hope that you teachers out there can use some of what we learned to inform the storytelling in your classroom!
♥️😆😂