Letters from Dr. Gillian McNamee
Dr. Gillian McNamee has been invited to serve as a consultant for Story Corner since 2025.
Experiences that might arise when you guide children
telling stories and acting them out
May 31, 2025
As you carry out the activities of children dictating stories and eagerly waiting to act them out with other children, lots of questions will arise. You will wonder: how do I handle this moment? What is a good way to respond to children when I grow unsure of myself? Yuching and I have talked about such moments we have experienced, and moments that teachers we work with have encountered. This essay discusses several such moments that you too might have experienced and what I think about when they arise.
Eager children: I have never met a group of children who didn’t love the activities of telling a story and acting it out with friends. The activities offer them happiness and a reason to listen, focus and bring the best part of themselves to school. Where does this eager happy focus in the children come from? You have everything to do with it and all that the children are learning along the way.
When teachers carry out these activities, you show the children that you will make time for their ideas, and that you listen carefully. Your careful listening and helping children find words for their ideas is a gift to them. Your attention and interest show children that you respect them and trust them. The children feel safe to open-up and be their happy, lively selves with you.
Retelling familiar stories: When children tell stories, they often take a familiar folktale or favorite video character and retell the story they have heard or make up a new version of the familiar story. The story of the three pigs is a good example. I have heard children in Taiwan tell versions of this story, and the story of the 3 pigs is probably the most favorite fairy tale among American children. The story has scary ideas: the 3 pigs go out in the world on their own without their mother and they have to overcome difficulties they meet. This is what every child hopes to be able to do. I think the story reminds them that they too will be OK out in the world on their own away from home.
Feeling unsure about your teaching skills: You might feel that you still have a lot to learn about these activities, and that your skills at guiding the children need further practice, but this is very OK with the children. They are just learning too! Yuching and I, even with our years of experience carrying out these activities with children, find ourselves facing moments when we are unsure. We too have to remind ourselves to think slowly and carefully about how to handle different situations. Children are so grateful for the chance to participate in the activities that they will work with you to improve how it goes. They care as much as you do that the classroom stay safe for you and them! I recommend you tell children often things such as: “I wasn’t sure how to handle a problem that came up this morning. Now I think this is a good way for us to continue in the future.” Tell them what you are thinking and ask them what they think. You will be the guide in the discussion to ensure that they are safe and that no one in the classroom gets hurt in any way.
Teachers and children copying one another: When teachers have the chance to share their experiences with one another, Yuching and I often hear how helpful it is for teachers to see how others are carrying out the activities in their classroom. We encourage you to talk with other teachers. Once you see and hear about different ways to carry out these 2 activities, you discover there are lots of ways the activities can be adapted and adjusted to fit your particular class of children. This is good! We benefit from seeing details carried out a little differently than what we might have thought of trying ourselves.
Children copy one another too. This is a sign of great progress in learning for the children as well as us teachers! We urge you to let the children do so also. When children and teachers copy someone’s ideas or ways of doing things, we are saying: “I like your idea. Your way of thinking and doing is interesting to me. I want to try it out to see how it fits with my way of thinking and doing. When I copy you, I am remembering something you offered me, and I want to look at it in a different way to see what the idea can mean for me.”
A story that worries you: I recently heard a boy tell a story about poop. As soon as the teacher heard the child say that poop was a character in his story, she began to feel tense. I would feel that way too. And perhaps you have heard from your children that include fighting, guns, or death. Do you find yourself feeling uncomfortable with some of the topics children want to include in their stories? I sure do at times! I have some suggestions for you when are uncomfortable.
It is important that you decide what is comfortable for you and your children in your classroom and tell children what your boundaries are. As in daily classroom life, a story must never include words or actions that hurt someone physically or emotionally. One question that goes through my mind as soon as I hear a child say something that startles me is, “Will this hurt anyone?”
I also recognize that children have strong feelings about fairness, justice, and fighting when needing to protect themselves or those they love. Telling stories where characters fight and kill bad guys is a way that children express their feelings about overcoming being attacked or being helpless. The benefit of story acting with the rule of “No touching” is that children can explore and express powerful feelings while no one gets hurt, just like we see in the theater or in a movie.
I am careful about words that sound unkind or harsh. In English, when someone says, “Shut up!” it sounds harsh and rude. So, I tell children, “When I hear the words, “Shut up!” I am not going to write down those words because they sound too mean. I will ask you if there is another way that your character can ask someone to be quiet in a strong voice with strong words.” Children never have trouble with this kind of guideline. They tell better stories when we pay close attention to words.
There have been a few times when I sit with a child to take down a story and the child says something like, “One day Daddy hit Mommy.” Right away I put down my pencil and say, “I am sorry that Daddy hit Mommy. I’m going to let you tell me about it, but this story is not for acting out with the class. It is for you and me to talk about. Do you want to tell me more?” Children understand this kind of guidance and appreciate the chance to talk about something that is hurting them inside. Given what the child says, you will know who can help this child and their family.
I hope these ideas give you a way to imagine the kinds of boundaries you will want to have to create safety and ease for the children in storytelling and story acting. I wish you all the best as you continue to try out the story telling and story acting activities that can become such an important part of your day in school with children.
Beginning Story Telling and Story Acting in Your Classroom
April 14, 2025
Yuching visits schools and classrooms of young children and their teachers to share her experiences with inviting young children to tell their stories and then act them out with their peers. Yuching and I had the lucky experience of having the same teacher guiding us when we first started trying out these activities: Teacher Vivian Paley. Even though we speak different languages and come from different countries halfway around the world from each other, Yuching and I share a love for what happens when young children tell their stories, when teachers listen, and when teachers help children share their ideas with one another.
Beginning: I have some thoughts about how to get started trying out these activities in your classroom.
When I first began trying out these activities, I was a beginning teacher. I had no experience working with children in small or large groups. Teacher Paley had one important reminder for me: do everything I possibly can with small groups of children, even with just 2 or 3 children at a time. I first helped all of the children learn what activities they could choose from in the classroom each day: painting a picture, drawing, building with blocks, trying out a new game like checkers, or pretending to cook meals for babies they were taking care of. With the help of
parents and an assistant teacher, then a beginning teacher could focus on an activity like inviting a child to tell a short story and act it out with 2 or 3 children who might be nearby. It might take 3 or 4 minutes to have a child tell a story that I wrote down such as:
Bird and Squirrel lived in a tree. They both liked to build a nest there. They ate nuts
together.
To act this out, I would invite the author to pick which character they wanted to be, and then I would ask the child next to him or her, “Do you want to be the squirrel?” Right then and there, I would reread the little story and the 2 children would act it out. That’s all! I did this over and over again and did not worry about doing these activities in a large group for a long time, until my confidence grew. And it did, but it took time.
I tell you this so that you will know that you can create small starting points for yourself and let the activity grow in your classroom in its own time, at a pace that fits you and your children.
First stories: I love hearing about the very first stories children tell, and how different their starting points are. Some children tell a story in one or two words. One child might describe a scene from Chinese folktale or poem. Some children use a drawing to tell their story, and some children pick a favorite story like Little Red Riding Hood to tell to jump-start their own story telling. A child might tell a story about something they did with their family recently.
Wondering: Your experiences with your children will raise so many things to wonder about. You might find that children do the following kinds of things:
Pick one story and retell it over and over again. What is it about that story that holds such interest and meaning for them?
Shy children, and those who often do not say much in the classroom, all of a sudden want to act in a story, and maybe even tell one. That is wonderful development when that happens! Why do the activities have such an effect on these children?
Why do children love acting out stories so much? They will often tell a simple story just to see it acted out!
Children with different kinds of special needs feel drawn to these activities where they seem more at home with the group than in other parts of the school day. What is happening that they feel so comfortable?
Yuching and I hope you discover ways in which these simple activities can add meaning to your school day and bring strength and closeness among children as they learn in your classroom.
Comments on children with special needs participating in ST/SA
February 9, 2025
Who has special needs?
In thinking about children with special needs in relation to ST/SA, it is helpful to know where Vivian Paley began her thinking. Throughout her career, Vivian REFUSED to label any child in any way ever. For her, every child has special needs, and their needs differed in every possible way. That's what makes each of us unique, special, a treasure, and simply the best! Vivian had a way of seeing and believing in each of us as deeply, and it was a gift to be seen in her eyes. She offers us the chance to practice this skill and extend it to every child we have the honor to invite a story from, and every child who will act in a story. She started there and so can we.
Children with special needs and methods of working with them:
The next detail is that the special needs we each have can be visible and there are plenty of invisible ones. Whatever the need is, we want to welcome it, accept it, treasure it and not feel that it is a burden or a reason to separate us from others. We might think and feel differently than what others expect but that makes us special.
Often we as teachers are looking for a "method" for working with children with autism, or a child who is in a wheel chair, or who has cerebral palsy, or a child who carries deep emotional fears at being separated from their mother or a favorite toy, or a child with a speech challenge: a stutter or problems forming words. Vivian would say there are no special methods for any range of difficulties. There is only listening, asking the child questions to find out what might help them, and seeking to help the child feel seen, heard, supported and welcomed as fully as any other child in the activities. The adaptations we make to help achieve that goal for any child are limited only by our empathy and willingness to help others.
Another important strategy for working with all children, and one that we may not be understanding how to help, is to ask other children to help you see what might help a child. Children have incredible ways of understanding one another that we might miss. So as the teacher listening to a child dictate a story who is having trouble with certain words that we are not understanding, we might say to a child nearby, “Will you help listen to what Sarah is saying and see if you understand the words so I can write them down?” Children will gladly help each other and you as teacher. When a child says, “Oh, Sarah means “mouse,” not “mommy.” You can then say to Sarah, “Is that right? Did you mean “mouse?” It is important that we always check back with the author to confirm a word and its meaning.
For Vivian, adaptations to children's needs were simple: patience while listening, asking other children what they think might help a child who was struggling while showing deep respect and kindness toward the one in need. She would do anything to anticipate and accommodate a child through sheer generosity and kindness. She would say her methods for all children began there: generosity, kindness and respect and listening - all qualities that the teachers in our seminar already "took away" from the seminar on Jan. 25th. The teachers already have what they need to move forward with all children.