Native American Story Stones : Unleashing the Story Telling Child Within

As the Creative Digital Developer at Stories for Change / the Storytelling for Health International Conference, I have found myself completely reconnected with Storytelling but I spend most of my time on the project indoors, sat at my computer, online designing the website, managing the Group page on Facebook and devising creative evaluation techniques.

So, when the sun came out today, I decided that I wanted to do something storytelling based outside and completely hands on.

I looked up some Native American symbols as a basis for a storytelling prompt. I thought I might like to make a little bag of stones decorated with Native American symbols and pull them out of the little bag randomly, to see what stories the stones tell on their own.

We were very lucky because the sun was shining and even more lucky because we live half an hour from New  Quay, West Wales.

Jeff sat on the rocks living dangerously, eating his chips while I went onto the beautiful beach to find potential pebbles.

It was such good fun choosing & then washing the sand off in the sea, whilst chanting to the waves. It really felt as if I were unleashing the storytelling child within.

There was plenty of evidence on the beach that other child-like souls had been dancing on the sand here today.

I wrapped up my precious treasure and when we got home, I couldn't wait to draw the symbols onto the stones. I'm not very good at art but it was such fun drawing them all from the chart and then pulling out stones from the bag and listening to them.

I then took photo's of the stones and on the computer put the story words with the image to create an illustration.

This activity is such a lovely thing to do as a grown up but I couldn't help but think how wonderfully educational it would be for a group of children and/ or young people. 

• Multi Cultural Symbols and Language
• Storytelling Oracy
• Literacy Skills
• Environmental Awareness
• Information Technology
• Artistic Expression

But most of all, great fun. So much fun they may never even notice the skills being taught.