Stories

The Gingerbread Man

The Gingerbread Man is a fairy tale about a Gingerbread man's escape from various pursuers and his eventual demise between the jaws of a fox.

In the 1875 St. Nicholas tale, a childless old woman bakes a gingerbread man who leaps from her oven and runs away. The woman and her husband give chase but fail to catch him. The gingerbread man then outruns several farm workers and farm animals while taunting them with the phrase:

Run, run as fast as you can!

You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!

The tale ends with The Gingerbread Man relaxes and letting his guard down so that a fox could snatch and devours the gingerbread man who cries as he's devoured, "I'm quarter gone...I'm half gone...I'm three-quarters gone...I'm all gone!”

How the Dragon was tricked

An older brother was jealous of his younger brother and one day tied him to a tree to be rid of him. An old, humpbacked shepherd saw the young brother and asked him why he was tied to a tree; the younger brother said it was to straighten out his back, and persuaded the shepherd to be tied there in his place. Then he drove off the sheep. He persuaded a horse boy and a driver of oxen to come with him. He played many tricks and became famous.
The king captured him and promised to spare the young brothers life if he brought him the Dragon's flying horse. He went and tried three times to steal the horse. Each time it neighed, alerting the dragon, but the third time the dragon, annoyed at being awoken, beat the horse. The fourth time, the horse did not neigh, the boy led him out, and once out, he mounted and rode off, taunting the dragon.
The king then demanded the dragon's bed-covering. The boy went and tried to hook the blanket during the night, but the dragon said his wife was hogging them, and pulled them, pulling the boy down. The dragon tied him and told his wife to cook him the next day while he went to church. When he returned, they would eat him. The dragoness untied the young brother so she could cut his throat more easier, but the young brother cut her throat and threw her into the oven. He stole the bed-covering and returned to the king.
The king then demanded the dragon itself. The boy demanded two years to let his beard grow as a disguise, and the king agreed. When the two years were up, the youth changed clothing with a beggar and found the dragon making a box, in order to trap him in it. The youth said that the box was too small. The dragon assured him that it was big enough even for himself and wriggled in to show him. The youth clapped on the top and told him to see if the youth would be able to escape. The dragon tried as hard as it could, and could not get out.
The youth brought him back to the king. The king wanted to see the dragon. He was careful enough to open a hole too small for the dragon to escape, but not enough to keep it from biting him and swallowing him whole. The youth married the king's daughter and became king in his place.

Fables

Bee-Keeper and the Bees:

This story is about a Bee-Keeper and his Bee’s he looks after to make him honey every month and in returns gives the Bees a home. One day the Bee-Keeper went to bed early. A Thief found his way into an apiary during tonight when the Bee-keeper was sleeping, and stole all the honey.

When the Keeper woke up and found the hives empty, he was very much upset and stood staring at them for some time. Before long the bees came back from gathering honey and finding their hives overturned and the Keeper standing by, they made for him with their stings thinking the Bee-keeper had broken there home and had taken their honey early.

The Bee’s all stung the Bee-Keeper until he cried, "You ungrateful scoundrels, you let the thief who stole my honey get off scot-free, and then you go and sting me who have always taken such care of you!" The moral of the story is, "Things are not always what they seem."

Suitability:

This story is suitable for young children as it has good themes for young children like animals and a moral to its story. There are simple characters to this story so that the children could easily understand the characters without getting confused, this story also contains animals which young children aged 5-7 would enjoy. The story also has an important moral the children to learn as it is “things are not always what they seem” which is good for young children to learn so they don’t jump to conclusions in their everyday life’s. There is also a lesson for the children to learn from the thief as it would teach the children not to steal because of the damage it could causes to other people.

This story could be told through a narrator and the rest of us acting out the story through movement by showing how the Bee act in their hives as well as a movement piece for when the Bee-keeper is stung by the Bees. We could also show our story by using cheerful music for when the bees go out hunting for honey as well as physical movement to create the flowers the bees get the pollen.

The Old Lion and the Fox:

An old Lion, whose teeth and claws were so worn that it was not so easy for him to get food as in his younger days, pretended that he was sick. He took care to let all his neighbours know about it, and then lay down in his cave to wait for visitors. And when they came to offer him their sympathy, he ate them up one by one. The Fox came too, but he was very cautious about it. Standing at a safe distance from the cave, he inquired politely after the Lion's health. The Lion replied that he was very ill indeed, and asked the Fox to step in for a moment. But Master Fox very wisely stayed outside, thanking the Lion very kindly for the invitation. The fox saw the tracks led into the den and not away, so he then tricked the lion into closing his eyes and rescued the animals trapped in the cave. The moral of the story is, “Using your head keeps you from making foolish or disastrous mistakes.”

Suitability:

This story is also suitable for young children as this story is about animals which young children aged 5-7 will enjoy, the story is also unrealistic which means children will enjoy it more as it will entertain there imagination. The characters of the story are interesting like the old lion tricking other animals into his home so he could eat them, I like this because I think it can offer an interesting idea for a performance where we could see several animals fall for the same trick of the lion which would be a piece of repetition and would help show a young audience that the lion is a bad animal and is good a tricking others. The story then shows us a smart fox which we could show by him outsmarting the lion which I think little children would enjoy as it would show them the benefits of learning so they could become smart. The morale of the story is also a good thing for little children to learn as it will help them use their head more instead of being silly.

The hare and the tortoise:

A hare boasts to the other animals about how fast he can run. When none of them responds initially to his challenge for a race, he taunts them that they are too scared even to try.

When tortoise speaks up and takes on the challenge, the hare scoffs that he won’t even waste his time racing the slowest creature in the world. Eventually though, he agrees to the race in a week's time. The tortoise spends the week in training, but continues to move very slowly, and the other animals wonder if the race is a good idea. Nevertheless, there is a large crowd of animals on the day of the race. The race begins and the hare roars off, while the tortoise plods along slow and steady. Deciding he is so far ahead the hare decides to have a sleep in the sun. However, when he wakes, the tortoise is nearing the finish line and takes and unlikely victory. The moral of the story is, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Suitability:

This story is suitable for young children ages 5-7 as the story is unrealistic which will feed the young children’s imagination and with the characters being animals’ helps to make the story creative as animals don’t act like humans so children would enjoy it more. For the story we could do a movement/ dance for the race between the Hare and the Tortoise showing how the Hare overpowers the Tortoise at first but then gets cocky which causes him to lose the race to the tortoise. The morale of the story is suitable and useful for young children to learn as the moral is “Slow and steady wins the race.” This is a useful morale for children to know as it teaches them not to rush anything they work on, so that they can get the best out of what they have worked on. This story would also help us explore creating environments using our body so we could create the trees, flowers and other inanimate objects.

Story Telling Skills Part 4

Today in lesson we worked on telling stories to selected age ranges and not just little children. We spent our lesson practicing telling stories to little children again as a warm up but then was given a select age rang and type of person like men at a bar or a group of teenage girls at sixth form we were also only allowed to use our diction and not any gestures or movements. We were allowed to say any part of a story as long as what we said would keep the interest of our target audiences given to us, we then had to try and tell the story but we could anything we wanted to tell the story except our diction which made this much more difficult task. This exercise was also different as one of us was now in charge of deciding what we said was suitable for our target audience, this helped us to not only practice perform to our target audience but also to identify the key traits of performing to our target audience by watching others perform which will improve our own audiences. After this we then worked on this again but this time with one long story that our audience for would keep changing so we would have to adapt our dialogue to the new audience, this became harder due to the constant change of audience and a new rule saying u must wait for 3 people to tell the story before I could speak again. Finally we then had to try and tell a story that was designed for an older audience but to little children in a way that wouldn’t tell them the mature content but still the story like if “someone was killed”, we would say that ”a person forced someone to have a long nap”. We all had to try and say similar things to this but in the way that was suitable for our audience of little children

Story Telling Skills Part 3

Today in lesson we worked on creating and telling stories through movement. We started the lesson by being given several scenario’s we had to move to like we one was that we were a mole digging around underground, so we had to move how we think that the mole would move. We were given several things similar to this that tested our range in movement ranging from moving like animals to at one point moving how we feel a chocolate bar would move, the purpose of this was to get us to stop thinking or being self-conscious about what we how we move and to just do what feels natural to us. Another thing we practiced was our special awareness as we walked around the room with our eyes squinted shut so we could hardly see and walk around the room with our arms out to the side without crashing into each other, we were told to stop and close our eyes fully and lean as far forward as we could without falling, to me this felt like an exercise to help us to control our bodies. Next we were given a list a scenario/place like the arctic and had to create this place by becoming the environment like for the arctic we could have been snow, so we would have to show our interpretation of snow using our bodies. We did with several locations and one of us was given a character to be in the scenario. The first scenario was a garden and a rabbit, the second was the sky with a little blue bird, the third was a amazon rain forest and a monkey, the fourth was a polar bear in the artic, the fifth was a volcano and lava and the last one was a snowflake in a storm. Finally we split into two groups and had to show a story of two scenarios, one group had to show a leaf that fell from a tree and was blown away but found its way back one day, my group was given a lonely snow cloud serrated by normal clouds and how it tries to join them but can’t. Each group performed these two scenario’s using all we had learned over the space of today’s lesson for movement, control and special awareness.

Story Telling Skills Part 2

Today in lesson we worked on our pronunciation and how we would address a group of little boys and girl. For the first part of the lesson we practiced saying the vows (a, e, i, o and u) phonetically in groups and by ourselves so we could stretch our mouth, vocal cords and our diction. His then changed into saying the tongue twister “Sally saw Sylvester stacking silver saucers side by side” which we first practiced saying and then attempted it in cannon so we had to focus on our speech. We then went into 3 small groups of 3 where once again said the tongue twister but with an emotion we had to show while speaking. The tongue twister than changed to “red lorry, yellow lorry” which was a harder tongue twister which we had to do in cannon as well as well as with an emotion in our groups of 3.

After this we split into a group of 4 and a group of 5 and had to tell the first part of the story to “Little Red Riding Hood”. My group started ours with a book centre stage which the 5 of us would crowd round, one of us then blow of the dust of the book and opened it. We each read a part of the story until we reached the part where “Little Red left her house. We than did our performance again but added key story telling techniques to the performances like for our opening we talked to the audiences and got them excited for the story. For the last part of the lesson we worked as a group  on telling stories, we all walked around the room  and one by one went to the front and told a line of the story. We were first given the story of the three little pigs to tell but then tried to make up our own story to by using the skills we learnt in this lesson and last lesson.

Story Telling Skills Part 1

Today we worked on our story telling skills for saying the details in the story that gives the story and characters emotions we show as well as how much emotion we give. In lesson we were practicing how to show emotion only using our eyes by standing still in a statue and then performing an emotion that was given to us only using our eyes. This activity then became showing an emotion using our body but not our face, after we showed how we moved with the emotion we then had to be un-naturalistic and do it again but making every movement as big as possible. We were then given a places like McDonalds to perform a scene that we would act out as a character we create in as much detail as possible, we would then freeze at a random part of the scene were we would explain our character, what their purpose is to why they are where they are, where they work and what they were planning to do later that day, everything we said had to go into great detail. My character I made was lonely banker who worked at Lloyds’ as the bank as the bank manager who is on his lunch break at McDonalds, I would be working late until 8, who would then go to rent the first die hard film which he would watch then go to bed, my character also had no pets, friends or relationships so was very lonely. This was character I created and had to show in the piece we created in McDonalds. Things would then happen in the scene and we would have to react the same way our character would. We did this big McDonald piece as a big group then we split and did it again but with different places and characters.