Panevėžys Elena Mezginaitė public library staff participated in storytelling training and brought that experience to their colleagues and applied it to their professional activities.
We know that storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, or instilling moral values.
So we decided that we need to teach the art of storytelling to our youngest patrons that the storytelling tradition grows with them.
Even the youngest children can’t read yet, so we used a perfect tool to create a story – a silent book.
It’s simple. Participants look at page by page and create the story themselves. Each participant has their own experience, memories, imagination. The book is a source of inspiration for creating stories.
We prepared presentation of the story education based on the Ieva Babilaitė’s wordless (silent) book “(Not) Alone” to the visitors of the Vilnius Book Fair “Image as Text”.
During the educational program, the silent book and its reading strategies are introduced to the participants. Participants create a story with the narrator using the illustrations in this book.
Storytelling education is a success in our library. Our patrons create a new story every time. The main character has a different name, the time of year, the environment, every time an essential event happens, but the story always ends in the same way – the lonely one is no longer lonely.
The education was prepared by implementing the project “Development of a Narrative Art and Method Model for Lithuanian Libraries” by Panevėžys County Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė Library. Artist Neringa Minkevičienė created and prepared a set of educational tools for this program.
The project is funded by Nordic Culture Point.
Text by senior librarian Anžela Vasiliauskienė
Leave a Reply