To celebrate Black History Month, I was asked to do storytelling at Campsbourne school. Their Literacy Coordinator asked me to run oral storytelling workshops with their Year 5 classes. I decided to take them to Ghana with a trickster tale.
As we were celebrating Black History Month, I shared with them the history of trickster stories from Africa and the Caribbean. The aim of the workshop was to get everyone composing their own ending to a story that I told them. First we did a couple of warm up exercises from Pie Corbett’s Storymaking book – Jumpstart. We had to mix the teams up as the class automatically split into boys versus girls!
Later on we used story maps to delve into character development and settings for the story ‘Kawku Ananse and the Unknown Assignment’ by Peggy Appiah. I hadn’t told the class the ending to the story so that they were free to explore all options for their own version. But by the end of the workshop they were bursting to know what the real ending was.
There was a magical silence in the classroom as I shared the final stage to Ananse’s escape. It was a lively afternoon and I can’t wait to go back next week and do another session.