Storytelling Reflection - Timmy's Tornado

For our free choice storytelling, I knew that I wanted to use a book while telling the story. While I really enjoyed learning to use ASL to tell the story for our "without a book" storytelling, I really enjoy telling a story with the book when I can and I am still learning ASL. I also knew that I wanted to try some new ways to draw the reader in. I was unsure of what book I wanted to use, but I continued to think over it as I worked through our weekly readings and waited for a book to speak to me. I am a pretty visual person, and good illustrations can make or break a children's book for me. When I read Timmy's Tornado, the book was not at all what I was expecting it to be. The illustrations are endearing, though, and bright and colorful throughout. There are some pages that children will most definitely laugh at. Most of all this book was imaginative and really displays the type of things that play through children's minds. I loved that about this book.

Reading Timmy's Tornado, immediately brought to mind the little science experiment with the tornado tubes many of us have probably seen before. I thought how it might make a good introduction to the story to get the kids interested and give them something to look for in the story. In a real life classroom or library situation, the children could come up after the reading was over and try the tornado tube themself. Giving a hands on opportunity for the children will make the experience more memorable, as well. Timmy's Tornado could be used across curriculum for young children alongside a unit on weather perhaps. It could be a fun addition whether they understand the more complex scientific reasons behind tornadic rotation or not. It plants a seed of curiosity about phenomenon in the real world while being fun and right on target for their age group.

Last semester I took PK-12 Content Area Literacy which, of course, taught about multiliteracies and how ideas can be reinforced across content areas. For example, having your music lesson teach math skills or connecting your PE instruction with the science of movement, aka. kinesiology. This storytelling experience gave me the opportunity to delve into that slightly from a different perspective as the librarian. I had only approached it from the role of teaching research practices or information literacy and technology up until this point. It could be that working in a middle school has shifted my perspective somehow. It made me question other ways that I could connect my story to another subject's curriculum or how I could use my story in collaboration with a classroom teacher's lesson in a similar way.

From this experience I sought out more information on the connection between science and storytelling and came up with some very interesting readings and TED talks on the subject. I was surprised to see so much information. In this article by the NSTA, Science to Story, Story to Social, they make the connection all across K-12 education. It states, "Students need opportunities to share knowledge in a nontechnical, yet still scientific, manner and to develop science communication skills in alignment with current demands in STEM fields."(Hougham, R. J., et. al., 2020). It accentuates the idea of how difficult scientific language acquisition is, so from the young to older students the importance of putting things in a language they can understand and that speaks to them is important. Then once they do learn the technical literacies of scientific language, they will need to be able to communicate those ideas to others in a way they can understand. For this reason, science and storytelling go hand in hand.

Not only is it good for us to relate the stories we tell to students to their scientific applications, but it is also important for the students to be able to tell a story about their findings. They suggest having students to write a story based on their findings on a field trip or from an experiment. This form of inquiry-based learning causes them to think critically about what they experienced and learned from the lesson being taught. It also better prepares them for a STEM based career as communication is a large part of the scientists job. I think articles like this bring to light how interconnected each of our subject areas are, and should make us think how we can better support learning in each of these area. As librarians we can model good storytelling and we can help them in presenting their story once written.

Another interesting source that I would like to share, is a TED talk that was presented by Stephen Hawking's daughter, Lucy. She retells an instance where her father answered a question a young child had about what would happen if he was sucked into a black hole. She explains how the way the story is told opens up the imagination of a child while answering scientific questions naturally inquisitive children have about scientific phenomenon. I think her talk is relatable, and supports everything we do as storytellers and librarians. How can we better feed our students curiosity in these areas through our storytelling? What areas can we connect the books we choose to their learning in other areas?

What I'm Reading This Week: Nonfiction

• My Life With A Food Allergy by by Mari Schuh

• Who Was Lewis Carroll? by Pam Pollack, Meg Belviso

• Hold Onto Your Music by Emil Sher

• The Prisoners, Earthquake, and the Midnight Song by Bob Hartman

• Penelope Perfect: A Tale of Perfectionism Gone Wild by Shannon Anderson

References:

Hougham, R. J., Herde, I., Loveland, J., Olsen, S., Morgan, T., Steinhauer, M., Goodrow, Z., Myers, M., & Oszuscik, S. (2020, June). Science to story, story to Social. NSTA. https://www.nsta.org/connected-science-learning/connected-science-learning-april-june-2020/science-story-story-social#:~:text=The%20Scientific%20Storytelling%20approach%20guides,experiences%20using%20imagination%20and%20creativity.

TEDx Talks. (2015, July 15). Science and Storytelling | Lucy Hawking | TEDxSalford. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/E7K-qlQVpgE?si=LC2Y3iC3MOyFS4P6