Interactive Storytelling: Scaffolding Children's Early Narratives

Tell me the story about the time your kitten climbed the tree and wouldn't come down. Tell me the story about the time you came to see us and you left your headlights on and we had to call someone to start your car, Tell me the story. . . My storytelling with Tim began as recountings of true events, evolving over time into retellings of stories familiar to both of us. Tim was three when I came to know him, and our storytelling would occur during my visits with him and his parents. As Tim became more familiar with these stories, however, he began to take over parts of the stories to tell himself, and a pattern in our storytelling developed that has come to interest me more and more as an educator. I have long understood the value of reading to children; many of my happiest childhood memories are of my father's reading to us four children, sometimes with all of us piled up in the big four-poster bed together or sometimes in the living room, my father sitting in the wing chair under the reading lamp while we sat or lay about to listen. Br'er Rabbit, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Long John Silver. Sometimes my father would start chuckling and have to stop reading to laugh at Tom and Huck's escapades, or Br'er Rabbit's cleverness. Good memories, memories that have served me well. Reading is for me still one of life's great pleasures. But my father was a wonderful storyteller too, and my storytelling with Tim likely had its unconscious origins in the delight with which we would hear again and again stories from our father's childhood. As Tim's and my storytelling developed along the path it took, I came to see new possibilities in telling stories to children. The value of reading to children has been well established, but the value of storytelling with children is often overlooked or deprecated. Furthermore, somehow print seems to exercise an authority over readers that oral language does not exercise. We learn very early that oral discourse is negotiable, flexible; print is immutable. What does this mean with respect to fostering children's language and literacy development? I think it suggests that story telling may be used in ways that are different from and beyond the influence of reading to children. Storytelling offers ways to bring children into the act of storymaking, ways of creating stories with children and not just for or to children. It is