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."