Tell It Together

Teachers and youth leaders seldom have the luxury of working with kids one-on-one to develop storytelling and performance skills. Most work with young people in groups, large and small. Story Theatre to the rescue! School librarian and storyteller Barbara McBride-Smith calls this art form a "near-perfect vehicle for teaching folks of all ages how to tell stories." In Tell It Together, McBride-Smith briefly discusses her approach to Story Theatre (she describes it as Readers Theatre on steroids). She even shows readers how to develop their own scripts – on their own or as a group project. But the real heart of this book is twenty-three tellable stories scripted for groups of performers to tell together. The scripts call for five to fifteen cast members and are designed for nine- to twelve-year-olds, though many are also appropriate for teens. Barbara McBride-Smith says learning to tell stories should be active, energizing, open-ended, and painless for both the budding performer and the coach.