SLIS 600 Post #4 - Storytelling Reflection - With Props/Manipulatives

I recently completed my third storytelling experience, which involved the use of props and/or manipulatives, and I would like to take this time to reflect on that experience from beginning to end. Below, you will find my recording of that experience.

The first thing that I had to do to complete this experience was to figure out what story I would be telling and what kinds of props and manipulatives I would use. When thinking of which story to use, the story There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly!, was one that immediately came to mind. The printing of the story that I used was by Lucille Colandro with illustrations by Jared Lee. I remember being read that story in elementary school and enjoying it. The old lady’s strange behavior that is both mysterious and gross, appealed to me as a child. I looked at a copy of the book on the website Open Library, and I thought that it would work well for my first experience telling a story with props because the story is told from one point of view, so I would not need to think about different characters when telling it and could focus on the props.

When thinking about what props to use, the first thing that I did was look at what I had available to me. Thanks to my niece and nephew, I have plenty of art supplies lying around, like paper, markers, and glue. My initial idea for a prop to use with the story, was to create a cutout of the old lady with construction paper, which I would then layer with animal cutouts as she swallowed each one. I searched online for other ideas as well, and while I was searching, I came across this puppet set for the story:

Seeing this puppet gave me the idea to create my own paper bag version that I could feed the paper cutouts of the animals to. The supplies that I used were one white paper bag, eight sheets of construction paper, which were each a different color, a black marker, and a glue stick. I really enjoyed putting it together and I think that a fun follow-up activity would be to have the children make their own puppets and create animals for the puppets to swallow. Instead of cutting out the outline of the animals, like I did, they could just draw and color them on small squares.

I drew on the bag with a pencil to get an idea of where the cutout pieces would go, then glued them on. For the animals, I drew an outline on the paper, and then cut out around the outline. When telling the story, I tried to always have the side with the outline facing away from the audience.

You can definitely see the outline on the back of
the cow here. The bird's legs were just lines that I
cut around and, though faint, they can still be seen.

The main problem that I ran into when practicing was with the puppet and animal cutouts. Each time I practiced the story, they would become more worn. The hole that I cut for the mouth of the puppet got wider with each run-through. The only way I can think of preventing that, would be to maybe reinforce that cut with some strong tape. Also, the animal cutouts got more and more wrinkled as I practiced because each time they were swallowed, I would grab them with the hand inside of the puppet and they would end up balled up in that hand by the end. To straighten them out before the recording, I laid some heavy books on top of them. If I were to repeat this performance in the future, I would laminate the cutouts so that they could retain their shape.

On the left, that mouth started out as a slit and ended up being about a half inch wide

when I was finished. On the right, I worried about the spider's legs falling off every

time I straightened them back out.

For the recording, I had a similar setup to the last two storytelling experiences, with my phone mounted to my laptop cart. I moved it in closer so that myself and the puppet were in view. I did some tests to know how close to hold the puppet, where to hold the book when showing the cover, and practiced showing the animals to the audience before the old lady swallowed them. To get myself into the proper headspace for interacting with the puppet, I would look it directly in the eyes before beginning. Doing that made me feel really silly, but I think that that silly feeling helped to set the mood for the story.

The two actions that I had planned for the puppet were to have it swallow the animals and to have it shake its head when I read the repeated line, “She won’t say why” (Colandro & Lee, 2014). Moments that came to me through practicing with the puppet included having it turn to look at me while I was reading, and to have it mouth along with me during one of the times where I listed off the order of the animals that it swallowed. It took me some time to figure out how I was going to deliver that repeated list of animals. I decided that I should sound sure at the beginning, then slowly shifting to a confused, question-like tone.

The ending was difficult, because I could not figure out how to get the now balled up animals to fly out of the puppet’s mouth in a way that kept my hand concealed. I wound up just having the puppet cough below the frame of the video. If I had been with an audience, I would have been able to tilt my hand lower to the ground, angling the puppet so that they would not have seen my fingers shoving the animals out of the mouth. With that said, I am still very satisfied with the experience. I had fun doing it and I hope that that came through in the performance.

This week, I also read the following twelve poems:

From Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends:

•  “Jimmy Jet and His TV Set”
• “Smart”
• “Rain”

From Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes:

• “Jack and the Beanstalk”
• “Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs”
• “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”

From Adam Rex's Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich: And Other Stories You’re Sure to Like, Because They’re All About Monsters, and Some of Them Are Also About Food:

• “The Middlewich Witch-Watchers Club”
• “Count Dracula Doesn’t Know He’s Been Walking Around All Night With Spinach in his Teeth”
• “The Dentist”

From Joseph Bruchac and Jonathan London's Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back: “Moon When Wolves Run Together”

From Joyce Sidman's Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night:

• “Welcome to the Night”
• “Moon’s Lament”

References

Colandro, L., & Lee, J. (2014). There was an old lady who swallowed a fly! Scholastic.