The Gift of Stories

I recently caught the last part of a show called The Call of Story. A panel discussion was interspersed with the panelists telling a story. The idea being shared is that stories connect us as families and communities, and are a necessary part of life. I found it to be a fascinating show. If you want to find out more, you can visit the website at www.callofstory.org.

In a sense, telling stories is what blogging is about, at least for many of us. We want to share stories with others, and we use the medium of writing on the internet to tell our stories.

I think about various workshops and conferences I have been to over the years - when you are in the field of education it can end up being quite a few - and the speakers and presenters I have always enjoyed the most are the ones who make their point with stories.

I have always enjoyed writing, and over the years I have written several stories, both real events and fiction. I recently found a box with some of my writing in it, and have enjoyed reading through some of the things I have written.

When I taught 3rd grade part of the language arts process was a focus on the writing process. As teachers, we were supposed to model the writing process for our students, including finding ideas. One of the things we did regularly was to "read my world", as the author Donald Graves refers to it. Basically you start listing the things you did that day. With the students, you talk it out as you make the list:

Got up at 6am
Ate breakfast - banana, toast, and cereal.
Got ready for work
Drove to work - on the way I saw a car pulled over on the side of the road with several people in it.
Unlocked the door, saw that someone had forgotten to take out the trash.
Realized I forgot my lunch, which was sitting at home on the counter.

And the list goes on until something strikes a chord and you end up with your topic. We wrote about real things like a trip to the laundromat, and fiction stories, like "The Girl Made Out of Laundry." We had plenty of fiction and non-fiction in our writing, since we wrote in class every day.

I taught 3rd grade when I lived in St. Croix, one of the US Virgin Islands, so we had lots of bug stories. One day when I was doing a "Read My World", I talked about the centipede and gecko battle I observed in my bedroom. That was my topic for writing that day. Everyone in St. Croix has at least one centipede story, so for the next two months most of our writing involved centipedes. As one student would share his or her story, another one would be reminded of something, starting off a whole new round of centipede stories. We even ended up with some fiction, like the boy who wrote The Centipede's Revenge, about giant centipedes coming up through the shower drain and terrorizing everyone. In his story the centipedes really were giant-sized, 3 or 4 feet long, and not just the regular 8 to 10 inch ones we saw often.

Just like that year, my talking about centipedes calls to mind many of the centipede experiences I had when I lived there, and may very well spark several stories here about them. Regardless of whether I write about centipedes or not, I do plan to write more of my stories and share them here.