learning experience

During the Slice of Life Story Challenge in March people are invited to write a slice every day for 31 days. You can read the slices at Two Writing Teachers.

Our stories are beautiful.
We have to tell our stories to understand how beautiful they are.
Children need to hear stories. Many stories.
It's our job to tell the stories not to wait for the kids to ask. They don't know that they need to ask.

Storyteller Piret Päär

I take these ideas and words with me from a last session of an international conference "Quality Education for Children at Social Risk. Sharing best practices and starting a dialogue." The storyteller who spoke was a small-sized woman, barely reaching the microphone at the podium, yet her words filled every corner of the conference hall, reached every heart, and carried the listeners to different places and times, stirred emotions, and changed us all in some way. 

It was a different kind of a day for me today. Instead of being at school, I was at the conference. My friend and I had been invited to give a workshop at this conference, one Estonian Reading Association workshop leader had recommended us to the organizers. Hesitant at first (we had given workshops to teachers and parents, but here the audience was unclear; we had given workshops in English, but it's not our mother tongue) we still said yes. Reading and supporting readers matters to us. We titled our workshop "Supporting Literacy Development of Children" and included five topics: importance of reading, role of adults, reading nest, read aloud and supporting readers. 

Today we felt well prepared: we knew our message; had a slide show with pictures and no more than six words on each slide; had practiced our text several times; had a balance of suggestions, facts and stories; and had brought two suitcases of books. At first we were worried that the participants might not be our target audience and the may feel bored. Then we worried that because of many parallel sessions no one would come. The latter came almost true. Never in my life have I been at a workshop with only five people in the audience. Nevertheless, it was a positive learning experience. Letting our passion show and keeping expectations high for ourselves we engaged the five people in a dialogue with us, and we know that we would be ready for a bigger audience too.

Right after us a woman from Uzbekistan shared how SOS children villages support children at risk. What a different world she described. Her worries were about getting enough clothes and food for the kids, to provide facilties where plumbing works, to keep them safe. She said later that our ideas of reading nests, book choices and  adult-child interaction during reading were like form a dreamland. In Uzbekistan the Government has announced that the country has 99,9% literacy. Their local Reading Association was banned. Learning at schools is still based mostly on rote memorization and thinking independently is not valued. I was so impressed with the work she was doing under those conditions. 

Finishing the day with listening to the storyteller made me almost cry. She weaved together the stories she grew up with, her personal stories, her storytelling experiences and stories of other people. She shared how stories had shaped her, how stories had touched tough audiences in the most unexpected ways, how in a trusting community people had really understood their own stories. I thought of my mom who has told us stories about her childhood so we can almost tell them by heart. And then I thought of the stories I have not shared with my children. I thought of our SOL community, and how our lives provide us with stories, and through telling the stories we shape our lives and who we are, and having an audience whom we can trust helps us to appreciate our lives and stories. 

Today I'll take these ideas and words of storyteller Piret Päär:

It's our job to tell the stories not to wait for the kids to ask. They don't know that they need to ask.
Children need to hear stories. Many stories.
We have to tell our stories to understand how beautiful they are.
Our stories are beautiful.